HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ Sir_Cmpwn

Found thanks to Sidnicious in another thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11266124

⬐ jastanton

Ha, this reminds me of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. It's a good (nerdy) read!

⬐ mitchtbaum

I had designed something like this with QR codes for an office. A camera would sit over top the desks to keep track of each folder and any stack that built up on top of it. That way anyone could quickly find what they need on any desk, instead of asking around.

Then, when storing and pulling any folder, it could go in any cabinet or box, instead of a previously defined, rigid, alphabetized and categorized location which would inevitably need to squeeze more than it could fit or waste a lot of space. A camera would (theoretically) automatically judge distance and location of a drawer in a storage room to accurately tell which one it went in or came from, or manually could be shown to the camera, as would need to be done in the case of a box. By consistently putting the folder in the front of the drawer or box, the computer could tell users the order and where exactly it sits (eg 2nd from the back, etc), which the color coded label would help identify.

QR codes still seem a little bit nicer than RFID here, except that Werkbank's image recognition goes even further than generic folders and makes good use of book cover images. It just seems like that robot costs a lot and has an unfortunate delay from when someone puts something away to when it updates a shelf's index. RFID seems better suited when it gets embedded in something like a toy or a farm animal, which a sensor can pick up near various "hot-spots", than when pasted flat on a book, tag, etc.

I'm so glad to see someone did this, and this library's (shared) approach seems to like a big step into Bret Victor's concept of Seeing Spaces: http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/

One interesting use:

https://vimeo.com/157990864

This library lets visitors rearrange the books organically (if you pull out multiple books on a topic, you're encouraged to put them back on the shelf together instead of finding their old homes). The books are tracked with RFID so that they remain easy to find individually.

⬐ Sir_Cmpwn

That's very cool! I thought it deserved its own post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11266334

⬐ spectaclepiece

yes indeed, 1 up

⬐ profeta

sadly, this one very interesting aspect is buried down the spiffy but hardly useful table scanner.

⬐ novaleaf

I'm a frequent library user, and this may be fine for certain types of collections (where you look for very specific books) but is terrible for general use, as you are removing the ability to search by topic.

⬐ blacksmith_tb

It could certainly slow searching by topic (since patrons are remixing the books based on whatever way they're using them). It does seem to demand quite a bit of infrastructure, adding RFID scanners to every shelf (and keeping them working). If it truly would allow every book in the collection to be pinpointed in realtime, that would be a plus, many times the catalog can only tell you that the title you're looking for should be on the shelf, not where it has ended up.

⬐ Laaw

How? One of the search terms could easily be topic...

⬐ novaleaf

right, and then you get listed the locations of 20 books on 20 shelves scattered around the library. Extremely fatiguing and time consuming if you want to skim a couple.

⬐ eterm

I guess the idea is that books naturally fall next to other similar books, a kind of "People who read this also read..." system.

I can understand the experiment, the dewey-decimal system doesn't have to be the ultimate in organisation.