This article was taken from the September 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
We Brits can get obsessive about preserving tradition -- even the practice of leafing through newspapers. The British Library has 750 million pages of newsprint spanning 300 years, and although it digitises some four million pages a year, it'll be 188 years at that pace before the whole collection is accessible on an iPad.
To keep the news rags of a bygone era in circulation, the library has built a storage facility in Yorkshire with a microclimate specially created for ageing newspapers: low oxygen to prevent fires, low humidity to prevent rot. But low oxygen also means no people. Once the collection moves in 2014, humans will be locked out and requested papers will be delivered by a robotic shelving system.
Three cranes, programmed with the location of each volume, will travel on rails to the right spot. There, its mechanical fingers will retrieve the newspaper in its tray and place it on rollers that whisk it to an air lock, which seals off the storage void before opening into a service centre next door. Every evening the day's haul is packed on to a truck, and, within 48 hours of a request, a paper from the distant past arrives in the reader's local library. Not exactly internet speed, but if you think of it as a robotic-retrieval time machine, two days isn't so bad.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
