Libraries and the discovery of information: Space, people, programming, and new ideas

Why did I take this picture of a short story dispensing machine during my tour of the Temple University Charles Library during last week's Society for College and University Planning’s Mid-Atlantic Conference?

I understand the benefits of the Internet and, indeed, I'm a just-in-time kind of person who thrives on the ability to retrieve information and resources on the fly. I also appreciate being able to locate things that I have just enough of a memory of to find them via search.

But I also lament the decline of serendipitous and accidental discovery that arose from book browsing, looking up words in the dictionary, and card catalogue searching. It took me forever to find the definitions of 20 vocabulary words back in elementary school because I would keep stopping to read other things I saw while flipping for the intended word.

I've wondered what this change in how we are exposed to and how we connect ideas means for our intellectual and, thus, social and technological evolution. What does it mean for innovation, diversity of perspective, and synthetic ideas that are midwifed by the happenstance of search and not efficiently served up by an algo.

I've thought about this topic with increased immediacy as I have worked on more library planning projects of late. I hear some resistance to moving books offsite because it could mean the end of browsing in the stacks and the awesome smell of old books. I have sympathy for this view, but I also realized that the kind of swimming amongst old journals I luxuriated in did not typify many library-goers' experience. Not that I was not alone.

The path forward seems clear. It's about focusing on underlying goals -- intellectual creativity, diversity of thought, access to information -- and to figure out how to achieve them with whatever toolkit we have now. A big part of this is understanding the latent function of a fading modality -- card catalogues were designed for, if anything, efficiency yet they preserved accidental discovery. How do we carry forward that function even as the modality fades? Can we muster the intentional and clever design approach that could expand serendipity and chasm-jumping even as we become ever more ensconced in digital, AI-fueled modes of exploration?

I say we gotta go for it. As we create the future, that means figuring out how space, people and programming can generate the kind of intellectual and social life that we deem desirable. And keeping our eyes open to new ideas too, including a short story dispensing machine that, as a bonus, includes an option for local literature.