I – Robot, to help You – Librarian

Modern librarians are called to become information and knowledge managers, however they are also requested to deal with a lot of routine tasks, like labeling, shelving, doing inventory. Shouldn’t we delegate these repetitive assignments to robots and save our time for more important missions? Will many of our tasks be taken by ‘increasingly capable machines’, as predicted by prof. Richard Susskind in his book “The Future of the Professions”? Since the 1980s we witnessed libraries to continuously ceding their traditional territories. Machine-readable catalogues replaced the card catalogues in the 80s, the Internet enabled the online public access catalogue (OPAC) in the 90s, while the RFID allowed in the 2000s borrowing, returning and sorting library items even in the absence of a librarian. Libraries embrace technology to offer better, faster and continuous services to their users. The Library of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) Luxembourg for Procedural Law explores the present and future use of robots in libraries. In 2016 the Library tested the Tory robot, MetraLabs Germany, to make an inventory. In only one hour the RFID tags of 35,000 books were read by Tory with an accuracy of 99,11%. The methodology and results will be presented, followed by a live demonstration of the new Tory model. The paper discusses new areas of robot implementation in libraries. In addition, the results of the ‘Robots in Libraries’ survey 2018-2019 will be discussed. The survey was conducted in 2018 in big university and public libraries in 9 European countries and continued in 2019 in 9 Asian countries. It gives a snapshot of the current robot implementation, the future expectations and concerns of the librarians. With the introduction of robots, library staff will be relieved of certain repetitive tasks and as a result will have more time to get to know their users and to devote themselves to service-oriented work.

现代图书馆员被赋予了信息与知识管理者的角色，同时又需处理大量常规事务，诸如贴标、上架与盘点工作。我们难道不应将这些重复性工作交由机器人完成，从而腾出时间投身于更具价值的工作任务？正如理查德·萨斯坎德（Richard Susskind）教授在其著作《专业人士的未来（"The Future of the Professions"）》中所预测的那样，能力日益精进的机器是否会接管我们的诸多工作？自20世纪80年代起，图书馆便不断让渡其传统业务领地：80年代，机读目录（Machine-readable catalogues）取代了卡片目录；90年代，互联网催生了在线公共访问目录（Online Public Access Catalogue, OPAC）；2000年代，射频识别（Radio Frequency Identification, RFID）技术则实现了无馆员在场的情况下，完成图书馆馆藏的借还与分拣工作。图书馆纷纷拥抱技术，以期为用户提供更优质、更高效且不间断的服务。马克斯·普朗克诉讼程序法研究所卢森堡分馆（Max Planck Institute (MPI) Luxembourg for Procedural Law）图书馆，聚焦机器人在图书馆中的当下与未来应用场景。2016年，该馆测试了德国梅特拉实验室（MetraLabs Germany）生产的Tory机器人（Tory robot）以开展馆藏盘点工作：仅用时1小时，Tory机器人便完成了35000册图书的射频标签读取，准确率高达99.11%。本文将介绍其测试方法与结果，并现场演示新款Tory机器人机型。本文还探讨了图书馆中机器人应用的新领域。此外，还将讨论2018-2019年“图书馆中的机器人（"Robots in Libraries"）”调研的成果。该调研于2018年在9个欧洲国家的大型高校及公共图书馆启动，并于2019年将范围拓展至9个亚洲国家，清晰呈现了当前图书馆的机器人应用现状，以及图书馆员对未来的期待与顾虑。引入机器人后，图书馆工作人员将从部分重复性任务中解脱出来，进而拥有更多时间了解用户需求，并投身于以服务为核心的工作。