Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become
Morville, Peter
Sebastopol , CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2005
Author’s website

I’ve been sitting on this review for a couple of weeks, struggling to figure out what it is that I want to say about this book. It was a strangely, deeply emotional read, a catalyst of longing and resonance I hadn’t felt about technical material since I read Ranganathan in my undergrad sophomore year.

Part of the weirdness of it is that it is nine years old, and a lot has happened in information architecture in the past nine years. William Gibson’s quote (really more of a metaquote) is overused – The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed – but it rang in my head over and over again while reading this book.  Morville is a visionary, with a complex grasp on the profound outcomes of emerging phenomena, and reading what he wrote a decade ago about what has since come to pass – smartphones, cloud computing, interactive entertainment devices, the infinite uses of GPS, cross-platform, cross-institutional, cross-cultural interoperability – is very strange.

What makes Morville different from a lot of futurist tech writers, and important, is that he is a librarian. He is approaching the question of findability, not from an industry or engineering perspective, but from an access one. The fundamental question he presents is: as data becomes more ubiquitous – as we approach an information environment where “anyone can find anyone or anything, anytime, from anywhere” – how do we design that environment from the ground up to support the best, most relevant, most useful information (not just the easiest information) reaching the people who need it (not just the people who are most skilled at finding it), while ensuring the privacy and safety of the user?  That is the essential question of librarianship in our time.

Morville circles back repeatedly to Mooers’ law (An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it), and returns to its original, deeper meaning. It’s not just that use declines in proportion to convenience. It’s that use declines as the information aquired becomes more powerful – more complicated, more challenging to the intellect or the status quo. People shy away from what makes them uncomfortable, what catalyzes change. Except when they don’t, driven by need, driven by change, forced into vulnerability.

It’s a painful process, seeking the out-of-reach fruit, going outside oneself. When I studied design in undergrad, and again as I’ve come back to an interest in design and information architecture, I keep coming back to compassion. Compassion for the user, user-centered design, findability as an ethical good, as the driving principles behind ease of use. Cataloging as social justice. As I struggle with articulating what makes libraries fundamentally different from market-based information services, I want to keep that at the center of my work, the human connection, the helping hand.

Up next: Interop by John Palfrey, a book on similar topics from a very market-oriented perspective, although (I just finished chapter 10) I’m promised that chapter 12 deals with library issues. I’m very curious to see how they’re handled. Also on the soon-to-read list, Morville’s new book, Intertwingled.