8 ms·

In the past, college libraries with open stacks of printed books were often the only way to learn of the existence of an obscure book that might be of use to yo

In the past, college libraries with open stacks of printed books were often the only way to learn of the existence of an obscure book that might be of use to you ... even change your life or at least enhance your research. They were in close proximity to other books that you knew to be useful. Example: I might be looking at someone's obscure technical book from the 1870s at the college they worked for ... and nearby might be the world's only remaining copy of a bio written by a friend or colleague that mentions facts found nowhere else. I won't know ... because neither is shelved any more. The 1870s book is found at archive.org. But not the bio. And the computer doesn't duplicate the proximity once found in the physical card catalog. The rewards of the physical browsing experience are lost in the digital age. No way to assess the damage that's been done by hiding college stacks underground in containers. To assess the effect of moving uncommon books to special collections with infrequent hours and stringent requirements. I have to wonder about the professionalism of the people who too carelessly make the decision to overturn systems evolved by centuries of scholarship.

codingdave 7y ago
Thank you for pointing this out. When I would do research in the library, I quickly learned that looking up one book was really just a path to finding the correct shelf in the library, where I could browse an entire shelf of books on the same subject. While I certainly appreciate the digital modernization of academic work (and in many ways even I am amazed that we wrote papers by hand, on paper, from paper books)... There really is something about just browsing shelves that exposes you to more options that I miss when researching online.
- marmot777 7y ago
  Yes, and that was kind of fun to stumble on that treasure trove.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  When I was in elementary/middle school I would become familiar with entire racks of books in the library, starting with the Tom Swift and Hardy Boy sections and then moving onto the adult scifi section. Surprisingly, you can duplicate a lot of the "see similar stuff" functionality through Amazon's recommendation engine (for new books anyway). The other things people have viewed/purchased for any given item are usually quite useful, and aren't limited by physical proximity, e.g. the Band of Brothers DVD listing on Amazon includes in its related items many nonfiction books, which you would never get from the strict categorization scheme in the library. I wish online library catalogs would do a better job of replicating this recommendation/similarity engine, because on Amazon things tend to be limited just to things that are still in print and for sale.
  - copperx 7y ago
    Your Amazon comment is obvious but I hadn't thought of it. I have to confess that I still go to my local Barnes and Noble to browse the tech section to see what's new and to browse titles I haven't heard of. I can't do the same at the public library because there are a lot of old books about obsolete tech right next to the (few) brand new books. The good thing about Barnes and Noble is that their selection is human curated because of their physical constraints. On Amazon, I can spend an entire week browsing the "Customers also Purchased" section. I've resorted to taking photos of the interesting shelves so I don't have to go there as often.
0815test 7y ago
Open stacks also meant that a lot of material got "lost" simply due to being misplaced (i.e. stacked somewhere it wasn't supposed to be). You could replicate the "proximity" simply by adding a topic classification to the library record, and making sure that users can search for "other books on this topic".
- misterman0 7y ago
  Google seems to look for the most relevant topics, then zone in on the one most likely yours, then fill the result set with topics mostly from the one it think you favor. At page three you'll find pages from all kinds of topics. I think this is an ok approach. But what if instead you filled the result set with the top result from each topic, and then let the user select a topic to drill down, you could have a "more like this" link for each result item and topic. Wouldnt that more resemble what we like about the library? We want to find the right shelf, then browse a while.
mimixco 7y ago
Yes! I taught myself programming by browsing the 000 section as a kid, something that would be impossible today.
- endymi0n 7y ago
  I don‘t know, had the exact opposite experience. Back with a C64, the only books in my library were about BASIC, sometimes I wonder what I could have learned with a proper introduction to 6502 assembly. For me, alone without mentors in a small town in the early 90s, I didn‘t even know what else existed and I would have been so thankful to the modern world of Codecademy and Youtube.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > something that would be impossible today Why?
  - cannonedhamster 7y ago
    I'd wager most coding languages are described in their website docs rather than in physical books long before they reach libraries. Only the most popular languages get a full write up more than a few times and then you've got to compete against shelf space already occupied by long useful books. While library organizations orgs have our can get most books, your have to know what you were looking for in advance.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      But you don't need to learn the very latest language in order to learn programming. I think it's pretty obviously nonsense to claim you can't teach yourself programming at all using the books available right now.
      - new4thaccount 7y ago
        Yes and No. Every library is different. A university library may be better stocked, but my local library's computer section is mostly old books on outlook, Excel, and Photoshop. There are some coding books, but they're mostly old books on VB and the like that might be difficult for someone new to programming to setup. The topics on loops and branching and variables are probably all relevant, but it's harder to learn just by paper.
zanny 7y ago
Theres no technical limitation preventing books online from either having an associated tags system to reproduce locality. Its more that online literature collections are hugely fragmented due to IP policy and are often treading on landmines trying to associate someone elses work in a novel way.
- imglorp 7y ago
  Seems more akin to a user-adjustable recommendation algorithm like Amazon or Netflix uses. Sometimes you want "what other users looked at after searching for this book," or "books with many similar citations," or "books with a similar wordvec distance."
  - majormajor 7y ago
    There serendipity encountered in the stories in this thread is essentially just different on one axis: it's not "personalized" or otherwise user-aware, it's content-driven active organization and presentation. That system can have its own ways of breaking down - consider trying to curate a collection of books on a topic you don't know about - but it gets at the limits of our current algorithmic approaches. Our systems don't know the content itself, just the feedback various others give about the content.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      I think a future function of the librarian will be virtual curation more and more (tagging, categorisation, etc..). Similar to what the archive.org people are doing.
- mattkrause 7y ago
  In principle, sure, but in practice... The bandwidth of a shelf is incredibly high. You can review hundreds of titles per minute. Along with the actual title and author data printed on the spine, the book’s condition gives you some hints about its age and popularity. There’s no friction if you want to pause and examine one title more deeply, and you can trivially pick up where you left off once done. The physical arrangement of books also papers over any deficiencies in the metadata, so that you’ll probably find something relevant, even if its title and keywords don’t match your initial expectations. It’s obviously not perfect: you need to compare books yourself, since reviews or circulation data are rarely available, especially right at the shelf. Nevertheless, I’ve never seen a web interface that was even close to as efficient as a library or bookshop.
wrp 7y ago
Powell's Technical Books in Portland also served that purpose for me. I discovered useful things from scanning the shelves that I wouldn't have stumbled upon through directed googling. Their current selection at the main store is much smaller and less productive to browse.
kwoff 7y ago
When I was in high-school, I'd drive to the local university and head to the 500s section: astronomy, physics, math, and other science stuff; and though there weren't all that many books, I'd spend a lot of time just looking through them. I'd get a book on blackholes, and it'd lead to physics, etc.
a3n 7y ago
> And the computer doesn't duplicate the proximity once found in the physical card catalog. This is what I miss about technical bookstores. Serendipity. And computers can't yet duplicate that, since what is serendipitous often has nothing to do with me until I find it. I found Calendrical Calculations on the shelf at SoftPro books in Centennial, while just generally browsing. I have never before, and never since, bought a book about calendar systems. What I like most about it was the historical treatment of different calendar systems and definitions of "day." https://duckduckgo.com/?q=calendrical+calculations&t=lm&ia=products https://duckduckgo.com/?q=calendrical+calculations&t=lm&ia=p... Had I bought it at Amazon, I'd see all sorts of time and calendar books that I have no interest in. But, I never would have found it to begin with.
- cududa 7y ago
  Back when I was a younger my local Borders book store had a 3 shelf nook of extremely technical books around software and engineering. Was incredible. I spent whole weekends there
- Jach 7y ago
  Sometimes when buying gifts for hard-to-shop-for people I'll use a random-word generator and put that into Amazon and see what comes up. The process has also found some interesting books for myself that I'd have been unlikely to come across either as recommendations or on my own browsing. Sometimes you have to be open to a less direct search style, or just pick a new word. For example trying it now, the word was "corrod" (I believe it's meant to be the Welsh plural of "cor", which is "dwarf or pygmy") and nothing was found so I might just move on to a new word. But something in Amazon's systems must be interpreting it as "corrode" and so one of the suggested sub-categories I noticed on the side is "Steampunk fiction". Here's an entire genre I didn't realize existed and would be unlikely to find or notice if it even exists at a library or book store. Now I can go look at random books in that category, or google for "best steampunk fiction" to get some good suggestions for entry points. You have to create the circumstances for serendipity.
pay2q 7y ago
The computer doesn’t duplicate proximity? So hyperlinks and search engines don’t add more utility to the system than the utility lost by unused library stacks? The proximity was nice, but mostly proximity of same category topics. That is mostly replaceable if someone makes a search engine on books, perhaps with a Dewey decimal number mode. Also consider that developed cities and thus universities are becoming more and more crowded. Study space is at a premium. The unused stacks should be kept mostly as wall dividers between new study cubicles, so that the new students have enough places to study. I think overall the utility increase is much higher
- mycall 7y ago
  This is what the semantic web was suppose to fix, but never really took off.
WalterBright 7y ago
> the computer doesn't duplicate the proximity once found in the physical card catalog. I can't think of any technical reason why an online card catalog cannot have proximity, too. In fact, if the card catalog was literally just scanned in, you'd have the same proximity.
- cududa 7y ago
  Because visual input and tactile response have an impact on people’s learning.
- copperx 7y ago
  Most online library catalogs have a browse function that lets you see which books are shelved together. A killer app for VR would be to browse Amazon's bookstore virtually. Imagine walking through the shelves of the biggest library in the world, pulling out a book, and reading it (even if it's just a snippet). Add multiplayer capabilities so you can interact with other library patrons and you've got perhaps the most addictive "game" ever created. This could be extended to create virtual product libraries. I would be really surprised if someone isn't working on this yet.
LorenPechtel 7y ago
Second this. When trying to learn something in a library I very often would look up where relevant material was stored and go to that shelf--and pick what I wanted to actually read from what was in front of me. I found that worked much better than working only from the card catalog.
pfranz 7y ago
What about wikipedia? From listening to other people, it sounds like I'm not the only one who gets lost in cross-references and ends up in a completely different topic than I started many hours earlier. When "researching" I tend to develop my own "stack" where I force myself back to topics I started with. Sure, it's only a small part of the web and not primary references. But it is a working example.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

codingdave 7y ago

Thank you for pointing this out. When I would do research in the library, I quickly learned that looking up one book was really just a path to finding the correct shelf in the library, where I could browse an entire shelf of books on the same subject. While I certainly appreciate the digital modernization of academic work (and in many ways even I am amazed that we wrote papers by hand, on paper, from paper books)... There really is something about just browsing shelves that exposes you to more options that I miss when researching online.

marmot777 7y ago
Yes, and that was kind of fun to stumble on that treasure trove.
CydeWeys 7y ago
When I was in elementary/middle school I would become familiar with entire racks of books in the library, starting with the Tom Swift and Hardy Boy sections and then moving onto the adult scifi section. Surprisingly, you can duplicate a lot of the "see similar stuff" functionality through Amazon's recommendation engine (for new books anyway). The other things people have viewed/purchased for any given item are usually quite useful, and aren't limited by physical proximity, e.g. the Band of Brothers DVD listing on Amazon includes in its related items many nonfiction books, which you would never get from the strict categorization scheme in the library. I wish online library catalogs would do a better job of replicating this recommendation/similarity engine, because on Amazon things tend to be limited just to things that are still in print and for sale.
- copperx 7y ago
  Your Amazon comment is obvious but I hadn't thought of it. I have to confess that I still go to my local Barnes and Noble to browse the tech section to see what's new and to browse titles I haven't heard of. I can't do the same at the public library because there are a lot of old books about obsolete tech right next to the (few) brand new books. The good thing about Barnes and Noble is that their selection is human curated because of their physical constraints. On Amazon, I can spend an entire week browsing the "Customers also Purchased" section. I've resorted to taking photos of the interesting shelves so I don't have to go there as often.

0815test 7y ago

Open stacks also meant that a lot of material got "lost" simply due to being misplaced (i.e. stacked somewhere it wasn't supposed to be). You could replicate the "proximity" simply by adding a topic classification to the library record, and making sure that users can search for "other books on this topic".

misterman0 7y ago
Google seems to look for the most relevant topics, then zone in on the one most likely yours, then fill the result set with topics mostly from the one it think you favor. At page three you'll find pages from all kinds of topics. I think this is an ok approach. But what if instead you filled the result set with the top result from each topic, and then let the user select a topic to drill down, you could have a "more like this" link for each result item and topic. Wouldnt that more resemble what we like about the library? We want to find the right shelf, then browse a while.

mimixco 7y ago

Yes! I taught myself programming by browsing the 000 section as a kid, something that would be impossible today.

endymi0n 7y ago
I don‘t know, had the exact opposite experience. Back with a C64, the only books in my library were about BASIC, sometimes I wonder what I could have learned with a proper introduction to 6502 assembly. For me, alone without mentors in a small town in the early 90s, I didn‘t even know what else existed and I would have been so thankful to the modern world of Codecademy and Youtube.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> something that would be impossible today Why?
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  I'd wager most coding languages are described in their website docs rather than in physical books long before they reach libraries. Only the most popular languages get a full write up more than a few times and then you've got to compete against shelf space already occupied by long useful books. While library organizations orgs have our can get most books, your have to know what you were looking for in advance.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    But you don't need to learn the very latest language in order to learn programming. I think it's pretty obviously nonsense to claim you can't teach yourself programming at all using the books available right now.
    - new4thaccount 7y ago
      Yes and No. Every library is different. A university library may be better stocked, but my local library's computer section is mostly old books on outlook, Excel, and Photoshop. There are some coding books, but they're mostly old books on VB and the like that might be difficult for someone new to programming to setup. The topics on loops and branching and variables are probably all relevant, but it's harder to learn just by paper.

zanny 7y ago

Theres no technical limitation preventing books online from either having an associated tags system to reproduce locality. Its more that online literature collections are hugely fragmented due to IP policy and are often treading on landmines trying to associate someone elses work in a novel way.

imglorp 7y ago
Seems more akin to a user-adjustable recommendation algorithm like Amazon or Netflix uses. Sometimes you want "what other users looked at after searching for this book," or "books with many similar citations," or "books with a similar wordvec distance."
- majormajor 7y ago
  There serendipity encountered in the stories in this thread is essentially just different on one axis: it's not "personalized" or otherwise user-aware, it's content-driven active organization and presentation. That system can have its own ways of breaking down - consider trying to curate a collection of books on a topic you don't know about - but it gets at the limits of our current algorithmic approaches. Our systems don't know the content itself, just the feedback various others give about the content.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    I think a future function of the librarian will be virtual curation more and more (tagging, categorisation, etc..). Similar to what the archive.org people are doing.
mattkrause 7y ago
In principle, sure, but in practice... The bandwidth of a shelf is incredibly high. You can review hundreds of titles per minute. Along with the actual title and author data printed on the spine, the book’s condition gives you some hints about its age and popularity. There’s no friction if you want to pause and examine one title more deeply, and you can trivially pick up where you left off once done. The physical arrangement of books also papers over any deficiencies in the metadata, so that you’ll probably find something relevant, even if its title and keywords don’t match your initial expectations. It’s obviously not perfect: you need to compare books yourself, since reviews or circulation data are rarely available, especially right at the shelf. Nevertheless, I’ve never seen a web interface that was even close to as efficient as a library or bookshop.

wrp 7y ago

Powell's Technical Books in Portland also served that purpose for me. I discovered useful things from scanning the shelves that I wouldn't have stumbled upon through directed googling. Their current selection at the main store is much smaller and less productive to browse.

kwoff 7y ago

When I was in high-school, I'd drive to the local university and head to the 500s section: astronomy, physics, math, and other science stuff; and though there weren't all that many books, I'd spend a lot of time just looking through them. I'd get a book on blackholes, and it'd lead to physics, etc.

a3n 7y ago

> And the computer doesn't duplicate the proximity once found in the physical card catalog. This is what I miss about technical bookstores. Serendipity. And computers can't yet duplicate that, since what is serendipitous often has nothing to do with me until I find it. I found Calendrical Calculations on the shelf at SoftPro books in Centennial, while just generally browsing. I have never before, and never since, bought a book about calendar systems. What I like most about it was the historical treatment of different calendar systems and definitions of "day." https://duckduckgo.com/?q=calendrical+calculations&t=lm&ia=products https://duckduckgo.com/?q=calendrical+calculations&t=lm&ia=p... Had I bought it at Amazon, I'd see all sorts of time and calendar books that I have no interest in. But, I never would have found it to begin with.

cududa 7y ago
Back when I was a younger my local Borders book store had a 3 shelf nook of extremely technical books around software and engineering. Was incredible. I spent whole weekends there
Jach 7y ago
Sometimes when buying gifts for hard-to-shop-for people I'll use a random-word generator and put that into Amazon and see what comes up. The process has also found some interesting books for myself that I'd have been unlikely to come across either as recommendations or on my own browsing. Sometimes you have to be open to a less direct search style, or just pick a new word. For example trying it now, the word was "corrod" (I believe it's meant to be the Welsh plural of "cor", which is "dwarf or pygmy") and nothing was found so I might just move on to a new word. But something in Amazon's systems must be interpreting it as "corrode" and so one of the suggested sub-categories I noticed on the side is "Steampunk fiction". Here's an entire genre I didn't realize existed and would be unlikely to find or notice if it even exists at a library or book store. Now I can go look at random books in that category, or google for "best steampunk fiction" to get some good suggestions for entry points. You have to create the circumstances for serendipity.

pay2q 7y ago

The computer doesn’t duplicate proximity? So hyperlinks and search engines don’t add more utility to the system than the utility lost by unused library stacks? The proximity was nice, but mostly proximity of same category topics. That is mostly replaceable if someone makes a search engine on books, perhaps with a Dewey decimal number mode. Also consider that developed cities and thus universities are becoming more and more crowded. Study space is at a premium. The unused stacks should be kept mostly as wall dividers between new study cubicles, so that the new students have enough places to study. I think overall the utility increase is much higher

mycall 7y ago
This is what the semantic web was suppose to fix, but never really took off.

WalterBright 7y ago

> the computer doesn't duplicate the proximity once found in the physical card catalog. I can't think of any technical reason why an online card catalog cannot have proximity, too. In fact, if the card catalog was literally just scanned in, you'd have the same proximity.

cududa 7y ago
Because visual input and tactile response have an impact on people’s learning.
copperx 7y ago
Most online library catalogs have a browse function that lets you see which books are shelved together. A killer app for VR would be to browse Amazon's bookstore virtually. Imagine walking through the shelves of the biggest library in the world, pulling out a book, and reading it (even if it's just a snippet). Add multiplayer capabilities so you can interact with other library patrons and you've got perhaps the most addictive "game" ever created. This could be extended to create virtual product libraries. I would be really surprised if someone isn't working on this yet.

LorenPechtel 7y ago

Second this. When trying to learn something in a library I very often would look up where relevant material was stored and go to that shelf--and pick what I wanted to actually read from what was in front of me. I found that worked much better than working only from the card catalog.

pfranz 7y ago

What about wikipedia? From listening to other people, it sounds like I'm not the only one who gets lost in cross-references and ends up in a completely different topic than I started many hours earlier. When "researching" I tend to develop my own "stack" where I force myself back to topics I started with. Sure, it's only a small part of the web and not primary references. But it is a working example.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]