There exist in the world, large and well-catalogued reference and research libraries. If you are able to visit you can call up pretty much anything you can think of, and sit at a table and read it.

But suppose you are unable to visit?

Well if the library has installed the pocmremote systemloc then you can still call up the most obscure papers and read them.

First, the library has to be catalogued well.

Then , it has to have an automated retrieval system installed in its stacks.

Then the system has to deliver the book to an automated page turning machine connected to a high-res camer (perhaps two cameras for viewing books with tight bindings)

The user sits at their home and using their computery thing they enter the reference they want, for example "Badger Quarterly: the Journal of the Badger Studies Society of the Buckinghamshire and Berkshire Border Area" perhaps with more qualifying information: "Volume LXXVIII part 3 fascicule 56". The requested volume is retrieved from the stack and placed on the machine under the camera.

From then on the user experience is a bit like viewing an old book on archive.org - you can flip pages, zoom in, read, chuckle and spill beer on the screen.

When you have done you click "reshelve" and the book is closed and transported back on the automatic re-stacking system.
-- pocmloc, May 03 2020

Or they just get a scanner, a few hundred terabytes of storage, and a lot of interns.
-- RayfordSteele, May 04 2020


^ 8ut there's nothing like manipulating the physical item.
-- wjt, May 06 2020


//a lot of interns// That's kind of what's already happening, but it depends on waiting a very long time for everything to be scanned, and of course the item(s) you want are at the far end of the queue. Also depends on copyright release, whereas live streaming of the object on demand individually should fall under some different kind of copyright loophole than scanning and storing.

//manipulating the physical item// these are serious scholarly books I'm talking about here. Don't get too excited.
-- pocmloc, May 06 2020


My alma mater made me send in for scans and then wait a couple of days.
-- Voice, May 06 2020


// a lot of interns. // // ^ 8ut there's nothing like manipulating the physical item. //

Is it possible to leave Bill Clinton out of this ? The idea itself is not without merit, but your sordid innuendo is really unnecessary ...

It's going to give "The William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library" a really bad rep even before it's founded... it will attract entirely the wrong sort of clientelle....
-- 8th of 7, May 06 2020



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