From: Leonardo Gonzalez (magos@extropian.net)
Date: Fri Jun 28 2002 - 16:06:16 MDT
In Remote Library Stacks, an All-Seeing, Scanning Robot
June 27, 2002
By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE
AS many a university student will testify, it is a blessing
to be able to visit a library Web site and download
reference materials in electronic form. When deadlines
loom, who wants to leave the house and roam the stacks of a
library in search of a book?
Unfortunately, the bulk of resources in most libraries is
still available only in conventional printed form: bound,
numbered and arranged on shelves. You can try doing all
your research electronically but at some point, you will
have to hunt down a book on one of those shelves, sit down
and thumb through its pages.
In libraries of the future, researchers at Johns Hopkins
University say, that kind of grunt work could be handled by
robotic systems linked to the Internet. As the first step
toward building such a system, the researchers have
designed a robot that can move about inside a library and
locate a book requested by a user, take it off the shelf
and carry it to a nearby scanning station. In the system's
envisaged final version, a second robot at the scanning
station would scan specific pages of the book that the user
was interested in. The user would then be able to leaf
through the book over the Internet from any location.
Besides providing convenient access to books and journals,
such systems could enable libraries to convert large
volumes of printed material into digital format. At major
university libraries, which routinely need to expand
shelving space to accommodate new titles, the technology
could provide an active link between the main library and
storage sites far away from campus.
The Johns Hopkins effort, called the Comprehensive Access
to Printed Materials project, was driven by a desire to
hook up the institution's main research library on its
Homewood campus in Baltimore with a shelving facility about
six miles away in another part of the city, Moravia Park.
Currently, materials requested from Moravia Park have to be
transported to campus libraries before they can be checked
out. The process takes about two days, a long wait for
impatient researchers and graduate students racing against
time.
"We found that many of our library users were not
requesting items from the Moravia Park facility because of
the inconvenience," said Sayeed Choudhury, director of the
Digital Knowledge Center at Johns Hopkins and a
collaborator on the project. "Not only do users have to
wait for a requested item, they are also unable to browse a
book or a journal before deciding whether they want to
check it out."
The project robot consists of a mobile platform equipped
with infrared sensors and an ultrasonic ranging device that
help it navigate. A rod fixed to the platform supports a
mechanical device that serves as the robot's arm. The robot
can adjust its arm level to the height of the shelf it
needs to reach. Attached to the arm is a gripper designed
to grasp a single book. A bar code scanner inside the
gripper tells the robot whether it is retrieving the right
book.
"Each book at the facility is kept inside an individual
cardboard case labeled with a bar code," said Jackrit
Suthakorn, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at
Johns Hopkins who is collaborating on the project. Unlike
the books themselves, which come in a variety of sizes, the
cases have the same dimensions so that the robot does not
need to adjust its gripper each time.
In its final, functional form, the robot will be guided in
its movements by a three-dimensional map of the shelving
space that shows the exact location of every book. Once it
receives a request, the robot will roll out from a docking
station, travel to the correct aisle and grab the relevant
cardboard case. The book will be delivered to a scanning
station where a second robot will open it to a desired page
and put it inside a scanner. The entire system will be
controlled through a Web interface, allowing users to
browse printed materials from anywhere.
While such robotic systems could certainly improve access
to library resources, some copyright issues would obviously
have to be resolved, said Catherine Nicholson, development
director for the Scottish Confederation of University and
Research Libraries. "You can't say we'll immediately
digitize whatever there is in print," she said.
Mr. Choudhury suggested that such copyright concerns could
be addressed by sticking to the notion of fair use. Access
to material requested by a user and scanned by the system,
for instance, could be limited to that particular user for
a short period of time. Even if those digital files were
stored permanently, Mr. Choudhury said, they could remain
locked away on the library's servers until another user
made a specific request to browse them.
Robots are already being used in a handful of libraries
around the world, although none of them perform the
complicated tasks for which the Johns Hopkins robot is
being designed. At the main library of California State
University at Northridge, an automated system retrieves
boxes of books from a storage site and takes them to a
processing station where a library worker picks out
requested items. A robotic system manufactured by ABB, a
Finnish automation company, and installed at a municipal
library in Vaasa, Finland, takes items dropped off by users
out of a bin and sorts them by subject.
Automated scanning systems could help libraries preserve
historical collections in electronic form, Mr. Choudhury
said. This year the Johns Hopkins team plans to use its
system to digitize materials including a medieval French
manuscript and Roman wood engravings from the 17th century.
"Once these documents become available on computer, they
open up numerous possibilities for scholarship," Mr.
Choudhury said.
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