Anyone who enters the 6,332 square meter reading room of the National Library (BNL) in Kirchberg for the first time will probably be overwhelmed by the enormous range of Books: 207,183 publications are available there on 2,128 shelves. Visitors can select, view and borrow them.
However, if books are misplaced or disappear altogether, for whatever reason, some chaos can ensue. Because it then becomes almost impossible for other visitors to find the desired book in the reading room. This is why collections must be regularly checked and inventoried – a job that requires a lot of time and resources, especially in large libraries, as is the case at the BNL.
The BNL reading room extends over five floors and covers an area of 6,332 square meters. © PHOTO: Christophe Olinger
A robot should be able to solve this problem – at least according to the proposals for the project called “Bot4Lib”. This is what emerges from the call for applications for an innovation partnership that the Ministry of Digitalization launched on the Public Procurement Portal in collaboration with the State Information Technology Center (CTIE) and the National Library. Applications can be submitted until January 30.
Man and robot will work hand in hand
But what exactly should the robot that will move around the BNL reading room be capable of in the future? And how should it be used? The aim is to simplify and speed up the inventory – and thus support the specialists on site in their work.
Currently, book inventories are still carried out manually at the National Library. According to the call for applications, however, only one complete inventory has been carried out since the opening of the reading room in 2019: between August 2020 and September 2021. Eight people identified for one month all the publications that were in the room reading at that time. This was followed by the data analysis phase, which lasted more than six months.
Since then, three partial inventories have been carried out, but there has been no complete inventory due to lack of time and available staff. The use of new technologies could therefore provide assistance in this area. It is therefore not a question of replacing the man at the BNL, but of facilitating part of the activities of the staff already in place. Robots and humans would therefore work hand in hand.
An autonomous device will move between the shelves
And this is what it should look like, as indicated in the letter from the Ministry of Digitization, CTIE and BNL: an autonomous robot equipped with a document recognition system will have to navigate through the 2,128 shelves in the room reading and identify all the books and documents found on the 9,231 shelves.
This should be possible using computer vision i.e. machine vision. This computer vision in turn uses artificial intelligence (AI) to recognize objects.
Both the individual shelves and the individual books have a certain identification, even if the identification of the books is not always unique. The shelves are also marked with a QR code and the books have an RFID tag, which is a system used to identify items using a type of barcode. This makes it possible to automate lending using self-service stations. Books are classified according to the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDK). This means that each document is assigned a specific numerical code, depending on its type and content.
The robot will be able to identify books using these codes and visual information. This will automate the inventory process. There would no longer be a need for a human to go through all the shelves looking for missing or misplaced books.
Night work for the “Bot4Lib” robot
Finally, the robot must transmit the collected data to a management system. And this is where humans come into play again: National Library staff can now correct any classification errors. The robot therefore notes the books which have been misplaced or which are missing.
The BNL reading room is open all week, except Sunday. © PHOTO: Marc Wilwert
However, the diversity of books present in the reading room will complicate the visual recognition of the robot: some book covers are, for example, made of circular spirals, other books must be placed in the opposite direction on the shelves due to their size . A challenge among others for “Bot4Lib” and its developers.
Those who think they will soon see a robot circulating in the reading room of the National Library will have to wait a little longer – applications are still underway. And it is already certain that the “Bot4Lib” robot will carry out its work at night, that is to say between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. It is therefore not certain that users of the reading room will be able to see him at work.
This article was originally published on the website of Luxembourg word.
Adaptation: Megane Kambala
