The vault where Harvard keeps millions of books

Re:The vault where Harvard keeps millions of books by gwern on Sunday February 08, 2015 @03:39PM (#9018465)

> When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, I knew the Harvard Depository only as it appeared in the online library catalogue. I could click a button and a book would magically appear on campus a couple days later. By my senior year, I could click a button and an email would pop up in my inbox a couple days later, with a scanned PDF of the book section I requested.

Nice.

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Re:The vault where Harvard keeps millions of books by fernly on Sunday February 08, 2015 @06:50PM (#9019078)

Interesting. They are implementing, in effect, an LRU cache algorithm: scanning books as they are requested. The next person to request that book gets an email in 30 seconds, not two days.

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Re:The vault where Harvard keeps millions of books by thret on Sunday February 08, 2015 @08:07PM (#9019284)

What are they discarding? It's more of a FIFO isn't it? I assume that when they have no new requests they are scanning books based on some other criteria.

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Re:The vault where Harvard keeps millions of books by cjubb39 on Sunday February 08, 2015 @08:52PM (#9019393)

Perhaps it's best described just as an infinite-sized cache. I would assume they have enough request to very rarely be idle.

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Re:The vault where Harvard keeps millions of books by gwern on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @03:53PM (#9035638)

Copy-on-write might be a better concept to allude to. You're making a new version, but efficiently, on demand.

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