Blogging Librarian

Are robots going to be next thing that is going to make librarians lose their jobs after the Internet?

Thankfully, it will be still quite a number of years away before robots will be able to fully take over the job of a human librarian. However, the library in the Chicago State University are making use of robots to retrieve books from the shelves as librarians and users are not allowed to go to the shelves. The person requesting for the book will need to know the exact title of the book s/he wants and the robot will retrieve it from the warehouse. All in, it would take about 3 minutes for the system to retrieve the book order as compared to 30 minutes previously when it was left to the students. However, I feel that this might not work in a public library as it prevents the user from exploring books by other authors or chancing upon an interesting book. Well, you can’t have the best of both worlds … not yet anyway.

You can read more about the robot librarians from the LA Times and Chicago State University.

(via LISNews)

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