Will Robots Kill Joy of Browsing?

The Tyee.ca

Which books should humans browse on library shelves? And which books should be left to the robots?

University of British Columbia faculty are asking those questions as the university’s library builds a new storage system that uses robotic cranes to fetch books. The new Automated Storage and Retrieval System will cost about $4 million and be located at UBC’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, the new name for the Main Library.

While people can browse an online catalogue for books in the automated system, they won’t be able to physically browse them. This worries Max Cameron, a UBC political science professor and the chair of the Faculty of Arts library advisory committee. He is concerned library users won’t be able to find important materials if they can’t physically browse the shelves. That’s why he wants to make sure his committee pays careful attention to which books go to the new system.

“For research and teaching in which browsing is important, we’re not going to be able to do that [with the automated system],” he says. “That is a major cost to research. We’re now going to have to invent other ways of getting around if we want to be able to do that kind of exploratory work.”

First in Canada

The UBC Library will be the first library in Canada to use one of the systems. Books in the system will sit in stainless steel bins of different sizes. The bins will be located on a rack system, accessible to robotic cranes, the UBC Library website says.

A library patron uses the library’s online catalogue to ask for a book or journal. The crane finds the book through its bar code, picks up the bin in which the book is located, and brings the bin to the circulation desk. There, a library employee finds the book in the bin and holds it for the person who requested it. The retrieval time is about two minutes, according to the UBC Library website.

The UBC Library is expanding its capacity through the automated system, which is scheduled to open in May 2005, says UBC University Librarian Catherine Quinlan. She notes that UBC has the second-largest academic research library in Canada, and the library’s collection continually grows. Materials from previous decades are still important to research today, so there is very little that can be thrown out, she says.

12 million books on the wall

The library’s collection has about 12 million items, she says. And the library buys, on average, about 100,000 print volumes per year. The new system will have room for 1.4 million volumes, and the library will add items to it over the next 14 years, she says. Quinlan describes the system as the library’s “growth space.”

The automated system will not be limited to materials at the Learning Centre. All of the UBC library branches can put materials into the system to manage their space. “It sort of ends up being the backbone for the whole library system,” she says.

She notes that the system can also be used as “swing space.” As the use of the library’s collection changes, items can be moved in and out of the system, she says. That means that books that are being used more often can move from the system to the shelves, and books that aren’t be used as much can be moved from the shelves into the system.

She points to the system’s short retrieval time as one of its advantages. “If we’re looking at keeping the collection as accessible as we can, I believe that this is a much better solution than building some kind of warehouse in the Interior of B.C. and having to schlep stuff back and forth,” she says.

Another benefit is temperature and humidity control. She explains that since people don’t work in the system’s area, the humidity and temperature can be controlled to be optimum for the books.

Books behind bars

Faculty and student reactions to the automated system show that there are at least two kinds of library users at UBC: those who wander the shelves and page through real books, and those who boot up computers and type in website addresses.

Jean Laponce, a UBC emeritus political science professor, is one of the wanderers. When he did his undergraduate work in Paris in the 1950s, stacks at university libraries were closed.

In a speech to UBC graduates of the class of 2003, he described his love of open stacks. “The books were not hidden,” he said of the stacks he enjoyed while doing his doctorate work in Los Angeles. “You could walk among the million of them, you could touch them, take them from their shelves, and put them back in place and take them again in your hands and run your eyes through the table of contents and the index, and read a few pages, sit on the floor, take notes, and proceed as you would have done in the forests from where all these books came from.”

Laponce told The Tyee that moving books into an automated system is like “putting these unfortunate books in jail.”

Lost pleasure of ‘unexpected’?

Laponce says browsing allows people to quickly judge a book’s quality by considering the reputation of the publisher, the quality of the index and the quality of the references. “Invariably, browsing of this type leads you to discoveries of the unexpected,” he says.

Laponce notes that librarians place books on shelves based on their content. This means that when someone browses books on the shelves, they see books placed together in fields. That’s different than doing browsing online by using key words.

Browsing for materials online is useful for disciplines with a standardized vocabulary, such as chemistry, because searching by key words may yield results, he says. But he thinks online browsing does not work as well for disciplines like history, which don’t have a standardized vocabulary. “I would lose a great deal if the field of social sciences in which I work is no longer browsable,” he says.

‘We’ll retrieve 100’

Using an automated storage system would also be a big change for Masaki Kobayashi, a graduate student in the UBC education department with a purely serendipitous browsing style. Kobayashi doesn’t have a particular book in mind when he goes to the library. Instead, he walks along the shelves, and pulls out books of interest. “I really enjoy sitting on the floor, flipping pages of as many books as possible, and making [photocopies] of books that I don’t check out,” he says.

But Douglas Bonn, a UBC physics professor, isn’t concerned about browsing real shelves. He says nearly all of the information in his field is moving over to the internet. Online browsing has developed in the place of physical browsing, he says, adding that he spends very little time browsing library stacks these days.

Bonn’s a member of the Science and Engineering Library Advisory Committee, which is looking at putting old journals in the automated system. As for his thoughts on the system: “It’s not something I’m thinking deeply or passionately about,” he says.

Quinlan acknowledges the concerns of users who like to browse physical stacks. She notes that the library will not put an item in the automated system that doesn’t have a record in the online catalogue, so no materials will be lost. She also says that users can retrieve as many items as they want from the system. “If you want to retrieve 100, we’ll retrieve 100,” she says.

Faculty committees, which include student representatives, will work with librarians to decide criteria for which books will go into the system. Each library branch has a faculty advisory committee.

System earned fans

The automated system is a newcomer to a Canadian library, but it has been used in libraries elsewhere. It didn’t start out as a library tool. Industry used the technology first, according to the UBC Library website.

Libraries currently using the technology include those at the Northridge and Sonoma campuses of the California State University system; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan.

In 1991, the library at California State University’s Northridge campus was the first in the world to use an automated system. “We did it to save money because space is very expensive,” says Susan Curzon, dean of the Northridge campus library.

While there was initial resistance to the idea of the automated system, people soon realized it provided fast service, she says. Curzon says the library guarantees materials in the system will arrive in 10 minutes, and they usually arrive in half that amount of time. The library puts low-use materials in its system. She says the system is reliable and very rarely breaks down.

The library sees it as another storage location, Curzon says. She doesn’t think it has changed the culture of the library. “It’s really very straightforward,” she says.

$68 million library

UBC’s automated system was part of the remodelling plan for when Irving K. Barber, the founder the Slocan Forest Products Ltd., made his $20 million donation to the library in 2002.

An Oct. 3, 2002 UBC press release announcing Barber’s donation says “the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre will boast Canada’s first automated storage and retrieval system for the library’s print collection.”

The $4 million system is being paid for out of the funding for the remodeling of the library. In addition to Barber’s $20 million stock donation, which has since grown to about $24 million because the value of the stocks he donated rose before they were sold, the provincial government gave $10 million, and UBC put in $30 million. The capital budget for the project is now at $68 million, according to the Sept. 2 issue of UBC Reports.

Democratic browsing

The library is currently in its first phase of construction. Quinlan hopes construction of the entire project will be completed by the middle of Fall 2006.

The project includes about 40,000 square feet of renovated space, and more than 200,000 square feet of new space. The centre will use a range of technologies, and will be accessible for wireless use. It will also include facilities such as lecture halls and adaptable classrooms.

Meanwhile, UBC faculty members like Max Cameron and Douglas Bonn will consider which books should sit on shelves for humans to browse and touch, and which books should be stored within reach of robots. For Cameron, the ability to browse books in a library has a social meaning. “The accessibility of a library is an important principle, particularly in a democratic society,” he says.

Kathleen Haley is a frequent contributor to The Tyee and student at UBC’s school of journalism.