On March 1, American Library Association magazine “American Libraries” highlighted the Robotics Project, a multi-phase, multi-year partnership between the University Libraries and the School of Computer Science to create a home for the past, present, and future of robotics. The piece explores the work that the University Archives has done to collect, organize, and preserve CMU’s collection in the Digital Robotics Archive.
Bookend: Completing the Circuit
How do you archive a robot?
This is the question that Kathleen Donahoe, robot archive processing archivist at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Libraries in Pittsburgh, and a team of archivists, roboticists, and preservation experts seek to answer through the Robotics Project, which launched in 2019.
“There are just so many layers to how a robotics project comes about, and each has its challenges,” says Donahoe. CMU’s archive is not just robots. It also contains digital copies of the code they run on, records of research and development processes, photos, videos, and correspondence between collaborators.
Organizing these items can be tricky, Donahoe says. Caustic material needs to be protected in older engines and motors. Not all labs have the same workflow, meaning data can be spread across third-party platforms like Slack or GitHub. And in such a fast-paced field, she notes, preservation isn’t always a top priority, as robots may be disassembled and remixed into new projects. “[People in the lab are] not necessarily thinking, ‘We should keep this robot for 40 years,’” Donahoe says. “They’re thinking, ‘I need that arm.’”
Feature image by Heather Mull. "Kathleen Donahoe, robot archive processing archivist at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), poses with a selection of robots in CMU's archive."