On serendipity
June 5, 2007
I’m hunkered down for the final push to the end of the school year, so I haven’t had much time to write. But I wanted to share an interesting quote I came across while doing research for my final paper for my Classification Theory class. It’s from Elaine Svenonius’ Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization, which is a treatment of the history and theory of bibliographic organization and classification.
In the section of the book I was reading for the paper, Svenonius is talking about the fundamental objectives of a bibliographic system (like a library catalog) and how they have been envisioned throughout history. She starts with Charles Cutter, inventor of the card catalog and founding member of the American Library Association, and takes us up to the IFLA objectives of 1997. All of these, she notes, are insufficient, in that they don’t include the important objective of navigation — that is, the ability to “roam” from point A to point B and eventually hit upon something useful.
Svenonius goes on, with the following comment about “serendipity”:
Some users come to a search for information knowing exactly what they want. But other users do not quite know or are unable to articulate the object of their search, and yet they are able to recognize it immediately when they find it. Such users expect guidance. Bibliographic systems have traditionally met this expectation. An example is the guidance provided by a classification used to order books that are stored on the shelves of a library. Walking through library stacks (a microcosm of the bibliographic universe) and browsing, a user may suddenly come across just the right book and credit this luck to serendipity. But such a finding would be serendipitous only if the books were shelved in random order, whereas in fact they are ordered according to a rigorous system of semantic relationships, which like an invisible hand guides the seeker to his “lucky” find.
This gave me pause, especially after my recent post in which I made reference to a comment by Rick Prelinger (who is fast becoming one of my library heroes) that libraries offer the capability of serendipity, something which search engines never can. I think Svenonius has a very specific user in mind — one who has a specific item in mind and who is able to find it through references found in other documents. This seems to me like a pretty narrow sort of navigation. I get the sense that Prelinger is interested in a less structured sort of serendipity, one in which a user truly finds something she is not looking for. But Svenonius’ point, that the organization of a library catalog can create a sort of guided serendipity, is worth thinking about.
And I’m afraid that’s all I have time to do at this point — think about it. Today I serendipitously stumbled across a not-terribly-recent post by Ken Varnum about the effect of RSS feeds on Internet serendipity. It looks interesting, but I haven’t had time to really sit down and read it yet. (Did I mention it’s finals week?) Varnum also links to an article by William McKeen in the St. Petersburg Times called “The Endangered Joy of Serendipity.” McKeen also uses that phrase “finding what you’re not looking for.” This also looks good, and I also haven’t read it.
I’m really interested in this idea, mentioned by Prelinger and McKeen, of finding what you’re not looking for. Why is this important? Why would libraries want to help you do this? If I stumble across any more good ideas, I’ll try to write them down.
