Comments on: Artificial Historians

By: s¯nee

s¯nee — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

ok this 2+2=4 can be a good idea; but these robolibrarians will only be good enough to carry book bundles from one place to another, and they can also barcode all the books so its easier for it to fetch too, no text reading required . But… now how many poeple ‘actually’ go to the libraries; as in its not like ¥the old times, go and sit and read etc etc. everything is online (most of it), articles, journals, research etc.. even the books. some libraries here(DK), have huge databases on their main website, you just order/reserve the book and it comes to your mailbox..simple..this might be the case for science and engineering and totally NOT for some ‘shibrum-shibrum’ subjects like : HISTORY…
and all about robots at http://www.jeffbots.com/realbots.html

By: thatshortkid

thatshortkid — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting…. The robot-replacing-worker situation that’s been hitting the lower rungs of the ladder may be coming to an Ivory Tower near you. What’s also interesting is that tech PhD’s might end up putting ‘paper’ PhD’s out of business. Ha!

btw, i thought you hated the term ‘Ivory Tower’

By: Kiddo

Kiddo — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

A9 uses Google’s search engine as it’s backend – so theoretically at least, adding that interface to Google News is a distinct possibility.

Anyway, perhaps as a techno-geek and a historian interested in libaries(naturally) , you would like to know about Dspace – an advanced digital library system. One of it’s main goals is to preserve digital works over the long term.

As for the robot, it can identify a book based on a stored image of it’s cover or a barcode strip – matching it with the image on the book – or by it’s location – or by RFID – and once a book has been identified, information related to the primary key (book no?) can be extracted from a digital repository – like DSpace.

The work study kids can now move on to IT jobs – maintaining and developing DSpace like me, instead of manual labor ;)

By: sepoy

sepoy — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

kiddo: i need to move to mit.
can you put in a good word for me? they may be looking for a historian who wants to muck around in code all day. here’s to dreams

By: Kiddo

Kiddo — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sure, as soon as I get in there myself ;) I work at the other Tech right now .... DSpace is an open source project so you don't have to be at MIT to work on it :)