Visit to Australian National Library

On Tuesday the 30th June myself and 3 colleagues drove to Canberra to visit The National Library.
We went to find out how electronic printing of Request slips were implemented and to get an overview of their retrieval set up.
The guy who showed us around was very helpful and thinking about it we spent a large amount of the time asking questions.
They have 4 or 5 stack areas with one of those being offsite-they aim to deliver material within 45 minutes except with offsite which is within 90 minutes.
Clients can request material directly from the catalog- from memory a large percentage of the material can be requested this way. Clients can request 15 items at a time.
The material is checked out (their term:charged) to the client for 5 days- I can't recall why they check out for 5 days. If a client needs more items they need to return material and can request more once there items have been checked in (their term:discharged).
Once a client has made a request the system sends it off to the relevant stack area- each stack area has a printer, a fairly expensive looking one I might add. Each stack area is staffed by two stackies who collect the slips and retrieve the material. The slips are printed on A4 perforated in the middle- one copy for the shelf and another for the client. (A different colour slip for stack area or material type- i can't quite remember.)
The slip has call number detail and other bibliographic data- more data on the copy to go on the shelf and it has the clients name (they are reviewing this due to privacy), a barcode for the item requested and a barcode as a request number.
As a short explanation this is how they deal with issuing journals- the item is checked out by request # and they do something called "creating an item record 'on the fly' ".

They use Transcar to transport and deliver material to the Reading Room. Here's a transcar clip i found on youtube:


That may give you a bit of an idea. These machines transport the material around stack and deliver to the reading room via a specially designed lift.
The benefit is less staff walking to and fro between stack and the Reading Room.
Although we couldn't get a $ figure on implementing such a resource it is clearly very expensive.
We were also unsure if they had a transcar in each of the 4 stacks or if the transcar was able to manoeuvre between all the stack areas.