Were you looking for me, or did we just happen to be in the same space?

Serendipity is sometimes a strange experience in a library: you walk around the shelves and suddenly find something that you weren't looking for but seems just right for you. There are a number of triggers of the happy accident of serendipity: the cover, the title, the blurb - and these apply to all library media. The triggers work differently with each of us too.

The term was coined by Horace Walpole in a fairy tale called 'The Three Princes of Serendip' (1754)1. The Three Princes have been playing a part in the bringing together of library users and library materials for many years. So how do they produce pleasant surprises in our e-library environment?

Browsing the online catalogue isn't the same as browsing the library shelves and doesn't facilitate serendipity:
No, it isn't the same but the experience of online catalogues has been getting better and better. Book jacket images and enhanced data services have made the online catalogue a much richer experience. Add to these user contributions of reviews and ratings and it is becoming even easier now to make these new discoveries.

You can't flick through the pages of an e-book:
Well, yes you can. Amazon's Kindle on the Web does just that. Other services are coming online too. Then there is the Harry Potter e-book experience, Pottermore:
JK Rowling has said “I knew there was a demand for eBooks but I wanted to be more than that. I wanted to pull it back to reading, the literary experience, the story experience.” Quite how this will impact on the future of e-book is unclear.

I'd really like to hear a sample of an audio book:
There are now services, such as audible.co.uk, offering an audio sample so that you can get a few minutes experience of the narrator and the text.

The aggregation of these sources is one of the challenges for libraries. We cannot just rely on literary wizard heroes working with the Princes of Serendip to bring us just the right thing at the right time.

However, being in the same space isn’t the end of the story - there is still a challenge for libraries, aggregators, publishers and the manufacturers of e-book readers: for those of us who read at night, how will the e-book cope with us falling asleep? Will it sense that it needs to shut down and mark the page so that we don't have to remember where we had got to as we dozed off? And can it switch the light off too…?
 

			Written by : Steve Penn Categories : serendipity Comments : Read comments   Write a comment