In Praise of (Electronic) Serendipity

Elliot Brandow

Old books smell delicious, apparently like a combination of grass and vanilla. Browsing the stacks offers us a chance not only to enjoy the lovely aroma but also to stumble upon that fragrant book we didn't know existed, or that we wanted, but that is just the one we needed! Ah, serendipity! It

Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

consistently tops, or nearly tops, the list of 20th-century library features we sorrowfully mourn. As we move ever-increasingly toward electronic-focused library collections, it seems we'll have to forgo this feature and pleasure of physical browsing.

Roger Schonfeld recently posed the question in his excellent analysis of the landscape of electronic monographs: "given that there is no hope for many libraries of recreating the single-site book collection for browsing, are there other steps that can be taken to re-establish opportunities for serendipitous discovery in the emerging environment?"

But electronic browsing and stumbling just can't compete with searching, right? The war between a browsable Yahoo Directory and Google Search is long over:  Google won. And library catalog systems and databases have been riding Google's coattails since, emphasizing ever simpler single search boxes, relegating advanced features and browsing to the corners of the screen, or removing them entirely.