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> But there are books you don’t know you want and you won’t know you want them until they’re standing on a shelf in front of you. This is why I love the librar
by murphyslab 5y ago
> But there are books you don’t know you want and you won’t know you want them until they’re standing on a shelf in front of you.
This is why I love the libraries and old book shops. There's a lot of value in the serendipity of browsing, since you can discover related monographs that one's search queries somehow missed. Also it's great for inspiration: you see unconnected things which might spark new ideas or interests.
> It feels increasingly difficult to access forms of historical material which haven’t been diligently curated for your good, filtered into bland homogeneity to suit some corporation’s agenda.
It's good to escape that algorithmic curation of one's interests.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoI'll go further, browsing draws you into the here and now. I think I'm beginning to see a change in the way I function now as compared with two decades ago. Before internet browsing allowed me to sit and decide "Where do I want to go today", I did physically have to go somewhere. I have not studied it enough to figure out exactly what I've lost or the causes but I definitely feel that I have begun to live more in my head and less in the moment. Certain things though like browsing used book stores remind me of a positive thing that I used to do....
- dorchadas 5y agoAbsolutely. I love browsing university libraries specifically for this reason. Find where they shelve books on a topic I'm interested in and just browse what's around it. See the different types of books available, the different ways people have interpreted or written about a thing.