Thursday, December 28, 2006

If the Zombies Don't Get Us, the Robots Will

Hide your women! The robots are here! Or, to be more precise, they're at Chicago State University where mechanical drones are replacing clerks in terms of shelving books. The uninformed Wired Magazine, who seems to believe that all that librarians do all day is shelve shelve shelve, has reported accordingly and offers us these enticing numbers.

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
(2 hours to retrieve 5 books?)

I warned my own clerks that the future was nigh. Somehow they were not distressed. What troopers.
at

2 comments:

  1. Nina Lindsay12:42 PM

    The students who take 2 hours to retrieve 5 books WERE making out in the stacks. Which is one of the wonderful benefits of a library...no longer available at CSU.

    ReplyDelete
  2. coe booth1:03 PM

    One day, they will discover that the robots, indeed, are making out in the stacks!

    Nothing wrong with a little "robot love!"

    Hee hee!

    ReplyDelete