As I understand it when you order up a particular book, the robot fetches the whole box it’s in. It’s stuffed in it together with 50 or 100 other books. Conveyor belts convey the box to a room with librarians who have to select out the particular book of your desire with human hands. The book they send up to the circulation desk while the box goes back down to the stacks below.
The room where the desired book gets extracted isn’t visible publicly through the glass, so I have no empirical evidence on that part of the process. And if you return a book to the library? I suppose we can only guess that the process is reversed.
The stacks themselves are just jawdroppingly gaspworthy.
(Was that an L.A. thing to say? Anyway, they truly did drop and I did gasp. Anyone would.)
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| It’s possible to observe the observer |
Remember card catalogs?
One winter break at Uni when I needed to keep food on the table I worked a temporary job measuring the numbers of cards in each drawer so they could be more evenly divided between them. It wasn’t the simplest or most mindless work I’ve done.
Anyway, this museum display of a small cabinet of cards reminded me of those days. It looks a little pathetic there standing still all alone when you’ve just witnessed that giant robot at work. A few drawers seem to be pulled out partway “ironically,” and what’s that I see lining their bottoms, Sandpaper?
If I were Dante and knew enough Italian I could probably find a splendid way to express in perfect terza rima how the books feel about being banished to the Netherworld without a fight. But I fear they would speak too plainly. I fear I may not sleep at night. I fear I’ll be held to blame inanely, and that would not be right.
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This is one of a series of blogs about the new National Library in Jerusalem. More are on their way.
J.B. wrote:
...So that's what awaits many of us. Not a grim fate but a rather stark one!
P.K. wrote:
😱
Or perhaps
😬
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