Meet Athena: A Book Retrieving Robot

COLUMBUS, Miss. (WCBI) – The Fant Memorial Library at the Mississippi University for Women gets a new look after many years.

The three-phase project had been in the works for a decade and is finally complete.

One part of the phase, includes a robot that takes book hunting to a different level.

Meet Athena. She’s an automated storage and retrieval system and MUW’s Fant Memorial Library is her home.

She’s a two-story book storage system and is the only one in Mississippi and in surrounding states.

“Books that are lower use, instead of having them take up floor space, we can have them take up space in Athena instead, and it’s actually very cost efficient. It costs about one-seventh of what putting all of those books out on the floor would cost if you built all that space out,” says Mississippi University for Women Dean of Library Services, Amanda Clay Powers.

Powers believes other universities would benefit by having the book retrieving robot.

“It allows you to be a different kind of library. We are able to devote space to classroom space, student study space, the multi-purpose room space, which gives us a lot of flexibility in how the library works.”

Athena can house up to 350,000 items in these couple of thousand bins.

“Currently, we have about 100,000 items, which can range from books, some of the archives, bound journals, microfilm, DVD, anything. Anything that’s catalog can go in here, no problem. We have portraits in here,” says Mississippi University for Women Library Systems Administrator, Nicholas Jones.

The most popular books are still out on the shelves to keep that library feel.

The difference with these books on the shelves and Athena is there is no guessing game.

She automatically goes and gets the exact item students type in the computer.

“There will be a blue button that says retrieve item from Athena and once they click that button, all they have to do is, they get a little note that says report to the check-in and returns desk within seven to ten minutes, and then Athena springs into action, goes and grabs the bin that the book is located in, brings it to a platform and then notifies our stuff.”

Once Athena grabs the book from the bin and slides the requested book in, a staff member comes and gets the book for the student.

“There’s Loyal Daughters and then scan the item, tell her that we do have it, and then we get a ticket that tells us where the book is going to. So, it tells us our patron is WCBI and it needs to be checked out at the circulation desk,” says Jones.

MUW held a naming contest for their new robot last spring, and the name Athena was the chosen one.