Reading

As part of my job, I have been looking into Facebook and researching what it is. Which probably requires some explanation. No, I did not just crawl out of a cave, nor do I work in a cave. I work in an archive and my job is to save records of ALL types. Including digital ones, such as web pages. And social media. But, before I can save records, I have to know what the record is. So, what is Facebook? What can you strip away and still have Facebook? The ads? The banner? The background? Comments? Timelines? ???? That is what I'm researching, so I've been doing a lot of reading about social media and such and have found some really interesting articles. I've also been evaluating the extent of one of our web archive collections, to see how in depth our capture goes. Do we have all the pages, do they display the way we want them to, etc.

All my research and evaluating has cause me to think about the way the internet has changed how we read.

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When you pick up a book, you read a page. Then you turn it and read the next one. And the next. And the next. The pages aren't linked. You can skip around, but there is a limit to where you can actually go. Now, expand that to a library. You read a book. It refers to another book. You get that book. You read that book. Then you connect to another one. But there are still physical boundaries.

One of the things I love AND hate about the internet is that it is so non-linear. I read something on the internet. I click a link. Now I'm on a completely different site. I click another link. Another article, from another completely different site. It's messy. It's confusing. It's a giant maze, and there's no way to follow my trail back to the beginning. Of course, that can be said of the library experience, but it seems more possible to go back to the books I used two weeks later than to follow my internet trail two weeks later. When I search on the internet, I know I have to leave breadcrumbs somehow. (Yes, Hansel. Make a crumb of that link. And Gretel, email me that crumb). I mean, it's the internet. It's huge. Uncharted territory. Easy to get lost in. Sounds scary, right?

But there is something beautiful about the non-linear search. It's called serendipity, my friend. That beautiful "happy accident", where, through no planning of our own, we start at point A and end up at Number 929.* You know what I'm talking about. You sit down to find out the cost of new shoes and the next thing you know, you've learned that squirrels have tails specially constructed to protect them from the elements. It's like a conversation! (Oh, come on. You know you've had conversations like that). And maybe learning about squirrels isn't the most world changing discovery. But that same serendipity leads us to learn things that change the world.

So, to celebrate serendipitous discovery, I'm going to share with you an article I came across (which also talks about a book that I now want to read, so yes, it is relevant, even if it's a stretch) through serendipitous discovery. Enjoy!

*Archives do provide serendipitous experiences. Because an archive contains documents, not necessarily connected to one another, there is more of a non-linear approach to using archives. Archival collections aren't like books, where to understand Chapter 15, you probably need to have read chapters 1-14. A researcher in an archive can read documents from one folder, but skip other folders--or even documents--entirely. And, archival collections are only described at a very general, high level. Not every paper is mentioned in the catalog entry, or finding aid. So, the researcher has lots of opportunities to make their own discoveries. Go archives!