My cousin, who is a librarian, recently sent me this quote from Annie Proulx: “I mourn the loss of the old card catalogs, not because I’m a luddite, but because the oaken trays of yesteryear offered the researcher an element of random utility and felicitous surprise through encounters with adjacent cards, information by chance that is different in kind from the computer’s ramified but rigid order.”<\/p>\n
While I do think the loss of the tactile dimension of the old wooden drawers in dusty libraries is profound, I disagree that serendipity is gone with computers. Hyperlinks on the Internet can easily mimic with lightning speed what discoveries from adjacent cards used to provide. Want to see other books by the same author? Click on the author’s name in an Amazon.com<\/a> description of a book. Many online library catalogs have a browse search mode where you can look at adjacent titles. A daily visit to Google Books<\/a> shows some new random titles each day. Websites that are part of a “webring<\/a>” link to others on similar subjects and you can discover all kinds of stuff you might never have known about. I don’t think I have any shortage of “felicitous surprise” when surfing the Web. As evidence of that, here are the interesting websites I’ve stumbled upon in the past month (I keep track of any cool new finds in my web “travelogue” file):<\/p>\n November 14, 2008<\/i> November 13, 2008<\/i> November 11, 2008<\/i> October 22, 2008<\/i> October 17, 2008<\/i> No, I don’t think we are lacking in delightful discoveries from random walks through the Web as a replacement for library catalogues. If anything, the opposite is the case. It is too easy<\/b> to discover all kinds of random curiosities and fill our attention with stuff we don’t really need to know about. At least with the physical library catalogue, you could stop when you’d had enough, and you weren’t overloaded with all the lingering evidence of your meanderings. There would have been no temptation to revisit your trails through the “History” in your browser or to mark websites in your “Favorites” for further exploration some rainy day when you felt like wasting more time. In the olden days, you could write down only so much interesting trivia on a pad of paper you had with you, and that was the end of it.<\/p>\n Annie Proulx has it wrong. We have no shortage of serendipity and “felicitous surprise” in the computer information age — we are drowning in it. Far from directing our attention only to rigidly ordered information, the Internet opens up never-ending branches towards new nodes to explore. And we never get to the end of it<\/b><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My cousin, who is a librarian, recently sent me this quote from Annie Proulx: “I mourn the loss of the old card catalogs, not because I’m a luddite, but because the oaken trays of yesteryear offered the researcher an element of random utility and felicitous surprise through encounters with adjacent cards, information by chance that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/faithandtechnology.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/faithandtechnology.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/faithandtechnology.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/faithandtechnology.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/faithandtechnology.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/faithandtechnology.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/faithandtechnology.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/faithandtechnology.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/faithandtechnology.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nQuantcast<\/a> \u2013 \u201cThe World\u2019s Only Open Internet Ratings Service\u201d; \u201cQuantcast is a new media measurement service that enables advertisers to view audience reports for millions of sites and services to build their brands with confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nTribe<\/a> \u2013 free, member-created groups for every interest \u2013 discussions, photos, listings and more; tribes; pretty useless \u2013 too many tribes, too much garbage, not enough refinement in the top-level browsing feature
\nDotSUB<\/a> \u2013 Any video any language; translations of videos<\/p>\n
\nRoaring Twenties<\/a> database<\/p>\n
\nGoogle Guide<\/a> \u2013 tutorial for Google, not affiliated with Google<\/p>\n
\nWADP (World Association for the Development of Philately) Numbering System<\/a> \u2013 database of all authentic postage stamps issued by Universal Postal Union (UPU) member countries and territories on or after January 1, 2002.<\/p>\n