Mixing the old with the new
I’ve just been watching a this fascinating video of the incredible Tech Logic self-return and book sorting system at The Seattle Public Library. The series of conveyors, book turners, sorters and trolleys loaders, was pure eye-candy to this old engineer. The whole thing depends on RFID tags inserted in all the books.
In amongst the gleaming wizzo technology the camera lingers for a moment on the device used to feed the roll of RFID tags. (See the photo above captured from the video)
This obviously handcrafted assemblage of plywood, doweling, and what looks like a bit of plastic tube, looks a bit out of place with rest of the technology. Having said that I bet, after years of experience feeding rolls of things to stick in books, the folks in Seattle have concluded it is the best tool for the job!
Regular readers of this blog will know that I often bang on about how new technologies such as Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Talis Keystone & The Talis Platform are going to open up the library systems of the future. Some seem to think that will mean the overnight demise of the traditional, much maligned, monolithic Integrated Library System - be it Open Source or from one of the well known vendors - Wrong, these technologies will add value to, and help to integrate the library system in to its surroundings and the wider web, not replace them overnight.
It will be a fair old time before some of the elements of the traditional ILS/LMS will vanish from our libraries. For a long while, although you maybe accessing your library services via gleaming web services and API mashups, lurking in the background will be the ILS equivalent of the plywood roll holder powering something like circulation as well as it ever has.
The key to the SOA/Web Services revolution will be the way that these services can be layered around what we currently do, without detrimentally effecting what we do, yet making it very easy to realise the significant benefits from them - more of that in future posts.
August 8th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
The book-sorting system is eye candy and it’s neat in a Rube Goldberg-esque way (is that a US-ian phrase), but I continue to have my doubts about whether it’s really cost effective. Paraprofessional and non-professional staff replaced for capital-intensive machines (which need maintenance and repair—those of us in Seattle were ‘amused’ by the way the machine routinely lost books in it’s first year of operation).
It may serve as a good example of how mechanization and automation _isn’t_ always a winning proposition (lest I be called an unthinking proponent of mindless automation).
On the other hand, if it saves people from Repetitive Stress Injury, that would be a plus.