A high-tech stage coach
“Unfortunately, the bulk of resources in most libraries is still available only in conventional printed form: bound, numbered and arranged on shelves. You can try doing all your research electronically but at some point, you will have to hunt down a book on one of those shelves, sit down and thumb through its pages. In libraries of the future, researchers at Johns Hopkins University say, that kind of grunt work could be handled by robotic systems linked to the Internet.” - New York Times, June 27
The TeleRead take: Mixed feelings here. This would be a great transitional technology and a long-lasting one to use for retrieving rare books, but let’s not accustom ourself to limitations such as the one-reader-at-a-time approach. The true solution is a TeleRead-style digital one. Let’s not content ourselves with even a high-tech stage coach.
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