I have a new favorite Facebook group.
"ROBOTS HAVE GONE TOO FAR: Making out in the stacks is a right."
A stupid joke along the lines of the ever-popular "People who, Despite an Interest in Science or Math, are Socially Apt and Have Fantastic Sex Lives," right?
Alas, no. Frighteningly, "ROBOTS," for its part at least, is grounded in reality.
Last October, Chicago State University unveiled its new high-tech library complete with a robotically operated automatic storage and retrieval system.
Some 600,000 books, CDs and DVDs are stored in bins in a three-story facility behind the remaining open stacks (which house post-1990 materials). Each item is tagged with a radio-frequency ID chip, the mechanism by which the robots "know" which books to retrieve and sort.
The $1.7 million system saves money by cutting labor costs and maximizing space - foregoing the ASRS would have required a bigger, more expensive facility - but, more than anything else, it's remarkably efficient.
"The time that it takes you to retrieve materials from the library is time that you're spending not analyzing those materials or working," said Lawrence McCrank, dean of CSU's Library and Learning Resources. "When we did a cost-analysis study, we discovered that the average student was taking two and a half hours, on average, to retrieve six books. We bring it down to 10 minutes. That's a worth-while investment in education."
If you're a CSU student, it's as simple as going online, choosing your books and showing up at the circulation desk at your convenience.
With over 30 ASRS systems now installed in libraries across the country, robotics has become something of a trend for universities building new facilities. What's the likelihood of the Ivy League jumping on the technological bandwagon?
"Van Pelt still relies largely on the medieval process of going up and down elevators and manual labor and inexpensive student help," McCrank said. "Some learning communities are pretty conservative and would tend to resist such changes and the Ivy League has traditionally been in this category."
Ouch.
Armed with this Ivy-bashing and enamored with the idea of robots rendering the stacks obsolete, I was itching to blast Van Pelt for failing to be on the cutting-edge of higher education. Unfortunately, my plan was waylaid when Bob Krall, associate director of access services for Van Pelt, raised two legitimate points.
"Most of the facilities that are making any use of the ASRS have been purpose-built brand-new facilities," Krall said. "To retrofit Van Pelt is probably not in your or my lifetime. It's just not feasible to do that with this building."
That's a fair point, but Krall went even further when he attacked the very wisdom of robotic systems in libraries at all.
"I'm leery of having an all-request system because faculty and students really appreciate the ability to browse the stacks and come across things they otherwise wouldn't have," Krall said. "There are advantages to an ASRS - you get what you're looking for quickly and you don't have to wander around the stacks - but you don't have the same ability to interact with the material."
With that, Krall had touched on the issue that's really at stake here: is technology always progress?
Call me a Luddite, but I'd argue that it's not. As children of the digital age, we are conditioned to expect huge technological advancements every few years, if not months. We expect our laptops to get slimmer, the Internet faster and our Blackberries more intuitive. Time is at a premium, and any technology which makes life more efficient seems like a no-brainer.
We all want Penn to be "state-of-the-art," "innovative," "pioneering," - at the edge of the technological frontier. But, when it comes down to it, technology is simply a tool. If the tool isn't succeeding in actually improving our lives, then technology is reduced to a worthless, "look what I can do" exercise. In other words, the cost of any given piece of technology can outweigh the benefits, and with something as undeniably cool as robots, it's all too easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees.
Efficiency versus the academic benefits of browsing - which is more valuable? As McCrank and Krall both noted, it depends on the school, but at least at Penn, I don't think we'd be willing to give up the latter just yet even if it were feasible.
Perhaps, nothing can express this point more eloquently than the T-shirts the "ROBOTS" Facebook group is now hawking: Make Love, Not Robots.
Who can argue with that?
Adam Goodman is a College sophomore from La Jolla, Calif. His e-mail address is goodman@dailypennsylvanian.com. A Damn Good Man appears on Fridays.
