Ive never seen 2 people more excited in a library before.

I'm surprised at how quitely they moved. Makes me even more nervous that one of them will sneak up and squish me when I least expect it.

My mom used to work there when I was little! I went to the Take Your Daughter to Work Day one year with her and she let me play with them, but then after that I was so afraid one day someone would squish her while she was between them. :(

We had ones like that at ETC, but they were hand-cranked.

Mm. Nice threadless t-shirt Andrew :)

...so thats why katie went there...

You should play games in there. Like someone picks a book that you have to find and why you try and find it, the bookcases try to smash you.

that seems really necessary. regular libraries' aisles are way too open all the time.

We have those at our school too

When we were given a tour of our library at Uni, we were shown a room with a journal collection on these kinds of bookshelves. When question time arrived, instead of asking about what journals there were or how they were organised etc. all anyone cared about was "if I put my arm in there and then press the button, will it crush my arm?" and "if I'm in there and someone else presses the button, will I get crushed?"

I can't remember the answers, but it was probably a yes on both fronts.

wow!

The new library at the U of British Columbia (ikebarberlearningcentre.ubc.ca/) has its stacks in a climate controlled room that's browsed only by a robot. And robots are always the _______ of the future, aren't they?

I wonder if they could crush things? Do they have elevator like tendencies?

those shelves are
A) genius.
B) friken sweet.
C) from the future. who timetravled to get them?

that's super cool!

Whoa is that MSE library? I'm going there next year but they didn't show us the moving shelves on the tour! so awesome

those must mean the library can hold 2wice as many books & for me, who loooooooooves everything about books, would DIE IN HEAVEN!!! haha i wish my library would invest in some of those...

We made a short called 'The Button' about crushing someone in similar mechanical stacks at our library on campus.

this reminds me of *i think* the first resident evil game, there was a button that moved book shelves like that.

That's so cool!!!!!

someday, people will live in places like those shelves

I would totally smash my friends in the fiction section if our library had that!

We all seem to have the same morbid imagination here....how to squish someone.....
where's my ex wife?

those have been around since the late 90s. get with it, bro. :)

we have those at the hospital i work at. we squish people in them 'cause ours don't have motion detectors, there's just a strip at the bottom that you kick if you're in there. sometimes we have races seeing if we can make it to the wall and back out before it closes. then we try it on computer chairs. so many great things can come from them.

Pfft that is so old news. I actually have several in my apartment filled with Porn and more porn.

We have those at WAC, they actually remind me of pages turning in a book!

We've got those at UC. They are indeed awesome. I feign library trips to go play in them.

Funny how when the handcrank versions of the sliding shelves came out, I was all nostalgic for the old wooden creaky stationary shelves. And now that these are out I'm all nostalgic for the handcrank ones (like when you would have to crank really hard to close up several little gaps between several shelves down a whole line). So maybe there are two kinds of people in the world: those who love the new technology unabashedly, and those who get nostalgic about the old (let's call the first group the "Blu-Rays" and the latter the "Betamax Gang"). Hmmmm.