by , on Mashable
Laura Larsell is the information ontologist at Trapit, a content discovery, personalization and curation platform currently in beta. Laura holds an M.A. in library sciences from the University of Texas at Austin.
I love libraries and bookstores. I love the tactile, olfactory and social experiences these physical spaces allow. Clearly the Internet has given us ample and exciting new opportunities to engage with information resources, but the digital realm is still a ways off from satisfying many of our real-world needs. Putting aside the physical niceties of brick and mortar information repositories, one thing the Internet has yet to reproduce is the ability to easily and pleasantly browse its vast reaches. Browsing is a crucial component of information discovery; it allows an information seeker to expand organically upon an initial vague, often unarticulated need.
Imagine head to the stacks at your local library to browse through the cookbooks. As your eye traverses the shelves, you spot a book on kimchi. This book is exactly what you wanted to read, even if you couldn’t have initially articulated that desire.
Experiences like these sit at the heart of browsing — aimless navigation by subject or genre that brings you to something unexpected, yet ultimately rewarding. Browsing is a common manner of information resource discovery. However, the practice is not well-supported by the search-based or social methods of information discovery that dominate the web today.
Full piece at Mashable.
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