Meet RooBot!
At the beginning of the fall semester, UMKC students, faculty, staff, and community supporters were invited to email suggestions for what to name the Libraries’ new robotic retrieval system. Entries received ran the gamut from practical, to silly, to obscure. After careful consideration, the decision was narrowed to three and the call went back out to library users to decide.
The choices were:
- Capek, after the Czech play write who popularized the word “robot” in his 1921 play “R.U.R”
- Fletcher the Fetcher – no explanation needed
- ROObot, combining the name of UMKC’s Kangaroo mascot and Robot
Voting ended at noon on Sept. 29 and the winner was announce that afternoon by Dean Sharon Bostick and Chaz Walgren, Executive Vice 
President of the Student Government Association as part of the official dedication ceremony for the Miller Nichols Library Robot Addition.
664 votes were cast with RooBot receiving more than half of the votes, 337. Fletcher the Fetcher got 154, and Capek came in last at 149 votes.
Go RooBot!
Themocracy