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IIRC ... the Library of Congress Classification system, widely used by libraries to organize their books, is designed in part to facilitate serendipity: You fin

IIRC ... the Library of Congress Classification system, widely used by libraries to organize their books, is designed in part to facilitate serendipity: You find the book you expect, and you find unexpected related books and subjects nearby. I wonder if anyone has studied how online reference, including search engines and reference sources like Wikipedia, could be organized that way. Of course, these days some people think narrow-mindedness is a virtue.

nerdponx 9y ago
Eh? Wikipedia and StackOverflow are practically black holes of serendipity. Not to mention Reddit, Hacker News, and other places where people genuinely do search for things.
- ColanR 9y ago
  They are, but not in the same way. Look up "black hole" on wikipedia, you get serendipitous info on particles, spacetime, gravitation, etc. If you look it up in the Library of Congress, you get: "A stars, Asymptotic giant branch stars, B stars, Be stars, Black holes, Blue stragglers, Brightest stars, Brown dwarfs, Cool stars, Delta Scuti stars, Dwarf novae, Dwarf stars, and Early stars." I think the second set of results is a more useful serendipidy. https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/holdingsInfo?searchId=9410&recCount=25&recPointer=1&bibId=1196872 https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/holdingsInfo?searchId=9410&rec... https://www.loc.gov/aba/publications/FreeLCC/Q-outline.pdf https://www.loc.gov/aba/publications/FreeLCC/Q-outline.pdf