I've used Santa Clara University Library robots, (listed in this article), but I don't think these are a good idea at all.
You go to the library computer, look up the book you want, and press 'retrieve', and go to the desk. A minute or so later, the book shows up.
When I go to any other library, I browse the books on the shelves, maybe 20 or 30. I can quickly shuffle through them, maybe looking at just their spines to see what I want.
These robots just kill browsing completely. I think they are fine for some purposes - archives, but not for university general libraries where browsing should be encouraged.
I have two walls of bookshelves filled with books I've collected over the years. I'm a bit of a book hoarder, so any subject I come across that I find interesting usually ends up with a book purchased. I have well over five hundred at this point.
Problem is, our house is rather small, and my wife is interested in reclaiming her breakfast room (aka my office).
Ideally, diybookscanner.org would be farther along and I'd scan them all to files. I'd give just about anything to have digital versions of all these books. Sadly, I don't think it's possible or feasible in my time frame.
So, I play to buy a shed, place my books in plastic, labeled bins, and store them away. The problem is, I'm a technologist and developer, and I can never be sure what books I'll need on a given night. I think I can keep a 5-10 book rotation going and be ok, but I need to be able to find and retrieve the books quickly.
Years ago, when I had a few of the misguided but cool CueCats, there were a few projects out there to let you scan a book's bar code, retrieve its data from Amazon, and store it in a database. I'm hoping some of you can point me to similar solutions today. Ideally, it'll let me scan the barcode, retrieve and store the book's data, and tag it in certain ways (Bin A, Bin B, etc). It'd also have decent search capabilities.
Finally, I'll need either a way to use my iPhone as the barcode reader itself, or suggestions for an affordable reader I can purchase.
I have experience working with document storage business. You need to barcode and index all books. Barcode all locations and scan all books to that container they are. It will be like an excel table with 3 columns. Book name, barcode (ISBN or smth) and location barcode. If someone will look up from the catalog you will know the location. If they have ISBN it's possible to write a script to pull book info by it.
Or given the number of unscanned books, even just give it the controls for a book scanner, the books and probably some robot arms. Then let it figure out the scanning first in some layers. Shouldn't be that hard.
I was thinking about building something like this recently. Mostly to replicate the library browsing method online. How it works when I go to the library: I have a book I'm interested in. I look that book up and get its call number. I then go to where the book is on the shelf. I browse its neighbors and uncover books I never would have known to look up.
> For example, a sorting algorithm for a human to sort a pile of books or papers, or a structure for someone to manage a large bookshelf so that they can find a book quickly given its name.
Are we assuming that the human actually remembers the name of a book? If you go stand next to a big physical bookstore's help desk for an hour or even hang out at the library, you'll see a bunch of people go by there and ask for help finding a book they can sort of describe, but can't really remember the exact name of.
Yes, there are a number of warehouses with millions of books in boxes, indexed down to the book (hence the metadata of a book has a physical location in it).
I've wanted a app that I can take a digital picture of my 12' x 8' wall of uncatorgized books, and the program will tell he roughly where the book looking for is physically.
For instance, the "Book you are requesting is located top right, second shelf from the top."
I've thought about building one, but I don't see a market. Maybe, Librarians, and what's left of book stores? For instance, "Hay the computer says we have that book, but someone probably put it in the wrong section? Go use that app?"
App: take picture, hard part (would pull titles on spines of books, and put into database. Don't have a clue if that's even possible, without huge financial resources? Yes-it would be OCR, but what open source program could I fool with?)
(I'm also considering getting rid of most of my books. It's kinda tough. I've spend a lifetime collecting reference books, and 1st editions. To get a idea of the used book market, I have had over 100 pretty current computer/programming books on CL for $500, and one person was interested, and that was a scam.)
This really kind, eccentric guy in my neighbourhood is stockpiling books and has been doing so for years. He has an enourmous barn that he is obsessively filling with whatever reasonable quality books he can get his hands on but he is completely overwhelmed in terms of cataloging/indexing them so customers have to go through his barn sifting through cartons full of books. He charges $1 or $2 for whatever book you dig out.
He buys bulk lots from deceased estates and bookstores that are closing down. Entire shipping containers are being gifted to him and showing up at his barn. The barn is full and he is now storing in shipping containers outside.
There is great quality books among this quagmire but it takes hours of searching to find them. I figured HN might be able to point me to a solution where I could quickly photograph the front cover and have a script/google images compare the image to online info to index the title and author and then perhaps list them online...
I dunno, it just seems like such a treasure trove of books that he will sell for practically nothing because he loves books and hopes that they will find their way to people who want them - the barrier is allowing customers to find what they are looking for.
I wonder if a 'google streetview' like system could be used to find library books that have been misfiled.
A robot drives around the shelves taking photos of the books on the shelves, those are then matched to what is expected to be found in that section, obviously there will be some without names or labels on the spines - but hopefully not many. But it can atleast say there are 4 unknown books and 3 unaccounted for in a section.
Obviously that won't help in this case when delicate artifacts are in boxes.
That would be a pretty cool app, at least for people who have a lot of books.
A couple of times I've resorted to taking photos of my books when I just could not find one, so that I could look in the photos on my computer (where I can enlarge them and do not have to bend over uncomfortably to see the lower shelves) to find where the book was shelved.
I am not the domain expert on this project, but here at the Internet Archive we ended up developing our own system (not dissimilar from this one, albeit with significantly less automation) at a fairly low cost. Some links for details:
We've found that high-cost implementations are less appealing to smaller sites and libraries (which may have mandates that books not be shipped away), and we can achieve high scanning rates through parallelism rather than single extremely high-throughput stations. Additionally, many books are much more complex, valuable, fragile, or simply not amenable to automatic methods whereas skilled scanners can move through them with ease.
I tried doing this to my book collection a few years ago. Things that I found:
* Scanning ISBNs had a failure rate of at least fifteen percent, including finding the wrong title, or no match at all.
* Many of my books did not have ISBNs. For these, using the Library of Congress number often worked, but you have to open the book, find the number, and keyboard it.
* About one in twenty of the books had to be completely entered by hand.
* Using multiple lookup services helped, but only to a degree.
I got sick of it after a couple thousand books, and never even got to the paperbacks.
I should add: Thirty clams a month is insane (I just saw the pricing). I'd never, ever pay that in rental -- I might pay up to twice that /once/ for a well-written app which stored its index in a place that I controlled.
A good FAQ to add: What's your security story? I'm putting an inventory of potentially valuable stuff into your site, how do you ensure it's not going to leak?
1. https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/huntlibrary/bookbot
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