British Library robots look after old newspapers with new tech
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- Опубликовано: 18 сен 2024
- The British Library's National Newspaper Building in Boston Spa holds millions of pages from newspapers spanning centuries. New Scientist got a rare chance to go inside the void to see the robot cranes in action and find out about the measures in place to protect the history within.
Thumbnail image: © Kippa Matthews
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I love this
I would be interested to know how machine "reshelving" is done... Anything misplaced would be effectively lost forever 😲
Same problem at any normal library I would assume. Seeing as it is very automated you could to routine integrity checks. Start at row 1 column 1 box 1 book 1. Continue until you have gone around then start again. Could optimize by only checking modified or retrieved sections in the past X days.
Barcoded items, barcoded containers, and an inventory on a WMS.
@@syntaxerorr this is not a library, it's a storage facility to preserve for the future!
The way it's set up means it's incredibly difficult to misplace items as they are all barcoded along with their storage containers. Anything that goes in or out is scanned and the system tells you if the wrong thing is going in the wrong place which cannot be overridden unless it is part of an audit process on a separate part of the Warehouse Management System.
But in the unlikely event of something being misplaced then yes, it'll be very lost in there 😂
@@tomhigham7549 Thank-you for your explanation 😃
I suppose we have to hope that book lice will not evolve to live at 14 degrees C and 50% humidity.
If that was the case then the way the items are stored would be amended accordingly. Evolution usually takes a while so think we are safe for now 😂
Got to ask, we all know that newspaper is designed n adjusted to suit the current market of reader. I wonder if we, as society, has dropped so much intelligence n that's why our newspaper r just mostly propaganda or gossips?
News has largely since moved on from paper mediums. The critical reviews, therefore, are less, causing the quality of content to be lower.
This is amazing tech. But wouldn't digitizing and hosting at multiple locations be a much better idea than building this? Data with no back up isn't safe.
A lot of the time it boils down to funding, it is expensive and man hour intensive when you are talking about digitizing an ever increasing stack of a 75million+ unit catalogue. In addition licensing can be an issue as the items will often be owned by different companies/individuals who are storing their material inside (and whos permission would be required for digitizing a full copy of a publication). I don't know specifically for this facility, but I've worked with library shelving facilities similar to this (minus the slick robotic awesomeness) in the past and that is how it was explained to me when I asked the same question.
Like the newspapers, data needs to be maintained and can easily be deleted in error or otherwise. Plus the man hours involved will be enormous and massively expensive to get everything digitised. New editions of newspapers are of course digital so going forward there will be more and more being archived in this manner.
Many of the papers have been digitized.
We was in the centre spread of The News of the World and a strip next to the page 3 model in the sun when my mum and dad got remarried. It was a few years after Richard Burton and Liz Taylor did. There was also another couple up north that also were getting remarried and it was so rare that we got the story and the other couple didn’t get in the national press like us. I would love to be able to get that paper now as it has been lost over time in my family.
One word of warning to anybody. If it doesn’t work out once then don’t try again because people do not change and you are only going to go through what you did in the first place.
No doubt we will have it in there somewhere for you to arrange to view in St Pancras or Boston Spa reading rooms 😁
❤️👍
Horrible. You could be employing a bunch of homeless people to operate the book storage by hand manually for income.
At least that's what the anti-automation people think.