A recent New Republic includes an especially trenchant essay by Leon Wieseltier, "Going to Melody" (link to an excerpt, full text for subscribers.) He packs a lot into this meditation on the end of his beloved record store, Melody Records.
Melody outlasted the rise of Internet shopping, due to its very knowledgable staff and convenient neighborhood location. But Melody fell before Amazon's recently introduced Price Check app, in which smart phone users enter a shop, scan a bar code for an item, and then send the bar code info to Amazon and get a cheaper price. Commentators have justly pilloried this graceless gesture, as it relies on the disadvantages brick-and-mortar stores already have against Amazon--the need to pay rent and keep the lights on--to further weaken the stores. But as for all graceless things, like porn and Jersey Shore, there's a big market. And so Amazon Price Check ended the wonderful community asset that was Melody Records.
One reason Melody was so good, according to Wieseltier, is that it gave its customers the opportunity to browse the stacks. Here is Leon, in words that should make librarians across the land shout for joy: "It is a matter of some importance that the nature of browsing be properly understood. Browsing is a method of humanistic education...It is an immediate encounter with the actual object of curiosity. The browser (no, not that one) is the flaneur in a room. Browsing is not idleness; or rather, it is active idleness—an exploring capacity, a kind of questing non-instrumental behavior. Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges."
This is all true. It is why classification systems that organize books on shelves are a wonderful thing. It is why serendipitous research happens. It is why, as an undergraduate student, I went to the library for one book and left with six others that I did not know existed.
And, despite all these glories, there is absolutely no doubt that browsing as mode of information acquisition is out of style. Search has its limits, as Wieseltier notes. But search has won the battle all the same.
The question for academic librarians is, what do we do? Strategies to lure people back to the stacks, so they are on turf we understand, will fail. The better course is to build algorithms into search engines that encourage serendipity. Bring browsing into the workflow people actually use, rather than pining for the good old days. This would be an intersection of librarian organizational strength and computing science prowess, but in this blurry age the boundaries between fields are collapsing anyway. Now is the time to invent our future.
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