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\title{A Device to Automagically Detect Misplaced Books on Library Shelves.}
\author{Karl ``Get Rich Quick And Then Eat Out Forever'' Fogel}
\date{December 14, 1993}
\maketitle

        It's a waste of time for humans to have to worry about
mis-shelved or lost books in a library.  The task of detecting such
books can be automated by the following means:

        First, insure that each book has a bar-coded Dewey decimal
number label on its spine.  All books need to have their labels at
approximately the same height from the shelf (from the bottom of the
book).  Somewhere near the base is probably best.

        Next, a track (like a monorail train track) running the length
of the shelf is installed.  It can be partially hidden underneath the
shelf, if it is deemed unsightly, but it must run the full length of
the shelf.

        To detect if there are any out of order books on the shelf, a
barcode-reading device runs along the track, going from one end of the
shelf to the other, and it scans at the height of the labels on the
book spines.  It has some simple computational ability (or perhaps it
communicates with a smarter device somewhere, possibly the library's
main computer), and stops whenever it encounters an out of order book.
If it's smart enough, it can probably be programmed to save its state
as it is manually transferred to the numerically next shelf (or maybe
the tracks can be designed to lead to the next shelf, until an aisle
needs to be crossed).  If it's a little smarter than that, it can be
programmed to stop on certain Dewey numbers and emit a different kind
of beep; this way, librarians can be searching for books reported as
lost while also insuring that the shelves are in order.

        While tracks are needed on every shelf for this to work, each
library will only need one or two of the actual reading devices, since
there's no need to scan all shelves simultaneously.

\subsection{Some Miscellaneous Notes.}

        It's probably a good idea to give the reader some smarts (or
have it communicate with something smart), because it can be used for
all sorts of statistical analyses of the library's collection while it
checks the shelves.  The reading window should also have adjustable
height, in case some shelves simply cannot have the track at the
optimum location, or have oversized books (although technically that
shouldn't matter), whatever.  For places where no track is available
at all, it should operate as a handheld device, coping with the
uneveness of human movement.  This should not be difficult, since the
library scanners at the circulation desk already seem to cope with
that.

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