ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Finding a book you need in a library can feel like a needle in a haystack sometimes. 

But at UCF, hundreds of thousands of books can now be found in a matter of minutes through the university’s Automated Retrieval Center, or ARC. 

Inside the John C. Hitt Library, more study space and fewer books greet students. Now, many books are tucked safely away from students behind the circulation desk, protected instead by robot librarians. 

“We call it the ARC. It’s the first of its kind in Florida,” UCF Libraries Head of Circulation Services Lindsey Xanthopoulos said. 

Forget about memorizing the Dewey decimal classification system to know where to find books on shelves. This library looks more like a warehouse building, with the ARC poised and ready to retrieve more than 500,000 books with just a few clicks.

 “The books are all stored according to their height, so we’re not using any call numbers or subject designations for storing the books. It’s just, if it’s 10, 12 or 15 inches, it goes in that size bin,” Xanthopoulos said. 

ARC has five robotic arms, each stretching four stories high to grab whatever a student needs in a matter of minutes.  The ARC system is able to hold 1.25 million books, and slowly but steadily, UCF and students are working to move more than 90 percent of the library’s books over to ARC.

“If they do want something that we own, they don’t have to wait for us to go to a remote site," Xanthopoulos said. "They can request it on an online catalogue, and within five minutes, we can have it ready for them."

With student enrollment growing and more Knights on campus, every inch of library room is needed. By trading shelf space for study space, these robot librarians are making sure students don't fall behind while keeping their library a step ahead.​

“It’s pretty cool," Xanthopoulos said. "It’s definitely a different way of handling a library collection."