Robot Librarians?

Via Crave - CNET

If books are dying a slow death, libraries are also living on borrowed time. But that didn't stop the University of Chicago from sinking $81 million into the new Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, which ironically doesn't have any books on display.

The entire book collection is stored underground in a five-story chamber that can hold some 35,000 metal bins. If you want to actually crack open a dead tree and read its paper pages, you'll have to ask a robot to fetch it for you from the vault.

The five underground robot cranes, apparently made by Dematic, retrieve the storage bins in minutes. As the vid below explains, a human librarian opens the bin and gets your bar-coded book. Then you're free to read the tome in the light-filled egg-shaped Grand Reading Room, which is otherwise devoid of books. Welcome to the automated library.

Read the entire article here and watch the video below to see how this library works.