Chicago State University's Robotic Stacks
From January's Wired, a quick look at Chicago State University's automated stacks.
Robotic Librarians by the Numbers
- Top speed of CSU’s robotic librarians: 7 mph
- Average time for a robot to retrieve five books: 2.5 minutes
- Average time for a student to retrieve five books: 2 hours
- Capacity of CSU’s high-density storage: 800,000 volumes
- Robots making out in the stacks: 0
Comments
As one who spent three years paging books in UC Berkeley's Doe Library (among other things), I really wonder about:
"Average time for a student to retrieve five books: 2 hours"
Either Chicago State has the world's worst stack layout or the world's worst student employees--or somebody's funnin' with Wired.
Or there's some other factor that makes the stacks nearly impossible to deal with.
I do know that, if I'd ever taken half an hour (much less two hours) to retrieve five books in the Doe stacks, I'd have been an ex-page...
Of course, Doe Library only had about three million books, so maybe it's not a fair comparison.
Posted by: walt crawford | December 27, 2006 11:55 AM