After seven years under construction, Fant Memorial Library, on the back-side of The Mississippi University for Women’s (MUW) campus, opened newly renovated to the public. The renovations added many features to the library, including a coffee shop and lounge (“Common Grounds,” which “proudly serves” Starbucks products) twelve new student study rooms and a $1.3 million robot named Athena.

Amanda Clay Powers, Dean of Library Services, started her job at MUW on July 18, 2016. She has been the overseer of the last phase of the seven year renovation of a library that originally opened in the early seventies. She stated that the renovations were planned about a decade ago–as she calls it, “a long time ago.” The bond awarded to MUW gave $18 million to renovate the library. Burris-Wagnon Architecture, a firm out of Jackson, designed the new renovation.

Before coming to MUW, Dean Powers graduated from with a master’s degree in library science from Simmons College. She worked as a reference librarian at MSU as the manager of research services, of which she spoke as her true passion. This was evident when she spoke so excitingly about Athena, what she called the “ultimate accessory” to a reference librarian.

Athena is a two-story robot that acts as a smart room. It fills a warehouse-like wing of the library, a huge room with two stories. The room has four rows juxtaposed towards one another, making two huge hallways. The two hallways are identical, which are both huge metal racks filled with knee high, 4.5 foot long metal boxes filled with six separate compartments. On the floor of the two hallways lie railways, of which the “arms of Athena” travel on; the arms of the robot are as tall as the roof, with metal clasps on both sides than can travel the length of the columns. In the front of the room stands two “recovery desks” and the two computers that simultaneously locates the specific box on the row that hosts the wanted item. Students can go online to the university’s website and order a specific item. The software directs you to the machine, where the arms travel on, on one of the hallways. It then raises the clasp to the specific height of the box that hosts the wanted item, grabs the box, lowers it to the floor, and brings it to the recovery desk. The display of the computer specifies which compartment in which the specific item is in. The student then confirms the item has been picked up, and the robot returns the box to the empty space. The robot can work to retrieve two books at the same time, as long as they’re on different hallways.

The robot cost $1.5 million overall, but as Dean Powers argues, “As the numbers work out, it costs a seventh of what it would cost the library to build the floor space in the building.” At the moment, Athena is not at full capacity. Workers are pulling out 80,000 books out of its containers to put on the top floor of the library for a browsing selection. Dean Powers says this “gives room to grow our special collections, our rare book collections, and our manuscripts.” At maximum, roughly 80,000 books are going to be placed on the shelves, and 160,000 items in Athena.