In Haphazard Pursuit of Serendipity
Ted Gup, in his essay “The End of Serendipity” (1997), recalls his boyhood aleatory ramblings through The World Book Encyclopedia (p.478). His sons, he bemoans, linked to the Internet, will be able to do such precision searches that they will miss out on the serendipitous process of accidental, yet not unfruitful, discovery that characterized his own boyhood random explorations. As my own searches on the Internet, while often quite fruitful, have proven to be anything but efficient, I decided to embark on a network exploration on my own to test Gup’s thesis. Unless Gup’s sons are incredibly goal-oriented and e-efficient, I have tentatively concluded, they will be like me, and bump into all sorts of irrelevant websites, data, and miscellaneous byways along the information superhighway.
My first step was to “access the web” through the Netscape browser. I typed in the word “serendipity” to see whether I would get a dictionary definition of the term and possibly the history of its use. I recalled the a capella group from my childhood that called themselves the “Serendipity Singers” and idly wondered whether they had put up a site. What I got, after I clicked past photos of President Bush and Austin Powers, was a list of 505 hits, with an option to find more on Google. Among the first 10 hits were a wedding planner, the SERENDIP project, which is devoted to seeking out signals from other intelligent life forms in the universe, a site on ulcers and bacteria, and several resorts, bed-and-breakfasts, and, my favorite webpage of the lot, Serendipity Park, a nudist colony in Georgia. The homepage informs net explorers looking for pornography that there is none on the site, but there is a tasteful graphic showing a naked young woman in silhouette at the shore of a small pond. There is motion to the graphic; the woman repeatedly touches the surface of the water with her toe, sending out ripples over the pond surface, as a bird flies by overhead.
I could imagine myself, an electronic Odysseus, being marooned on some blissful but unproductive Ogygia if I didn’t go to a more scholarly search engine, so I clicked on the library’s “Electronic Resources” link and went to Expanded Academic ASAP, as I have had good luck accessing solid, well-documented articles in the past there. Again, I typed in the keyword “serendipity,” realizing that it would list all of the articles on the database that contained that word somewhere in the text, and got 3,232 hits. The first twenty citations included several initial titles from the Communications of the ACM, which stands for “Association of Computer Machinery,” including “Company profile of the frequent internet user. (Web addict or happy employee?)” and “Constructive approaches to Internet recreation in the workplace: ‘Banana Time’ takes on new dimensions when it comes to the internet.” I no longer remember exactly how I found the article that I would print out, but Daniel Liestman’s “Chance in the midst of design: Approaches to library research serendipity” in the Summer 1992 issue of RQ struck me as being directly relevant to Gup’s concern.
Liestman initially defines “serendipity,” tracing its origins to the writings of the 18th-century British author Horace Walpole, and identifying it as “timely and useful, but unexpected, outcomes, discoveries, or even tangents which occurred while in quest of something else” (524). Liestman goes on to identify six different types of what he calls “library research serendipity” and to speculate, based on extensive background reading, about the extent to which such “chance” operations in fact involve other forces at work, such as unconscious processes that proceed while the conscious mind engages in seemingly random searches.
I no longer remember exactly how my eye lit on the reference to James Rice’s 1988 Library Journal article “Serendipity and Holism: The Beauty of OPACs,” but I decided to seek it out and see if it bore any fruit for my search. I wondered why it had not been included in my initial database search, conveniently forgetting for the moment that I had only gone into the first 20 or so entries in a list of over 3,000, but I found repeatedly that I couldn’t access the article unless I actually walked over to the physical library building and walked up to the Bound Periodical section on the third floor. When I arrived, I found that the bound volumes went directly from “Information Science” to “Library Science” without the intervening “Library Journal,” so I descended to the reference librarian on the first floor. After some bewildering online searches, she ascended, this time in the elevator, with me and showed me that I had been looking at the bound indexes rather than periodicals. Once I had been set aright, I found the volume I wanted and located the particular article.
Even though Rice deals with OPACs, or Online Public Access Catalogs, rather than the Internet, which I realized hadn’t even existed in 1988, he nonetheless states some very relevant principles, such as his observation that “the potential for serendipity should be directly related to the number of different access points or potential ways of retrieving from a given system” (p.139). However, the statement with the greatest personal irony for me at that point in my search is the following: “There is another inevitable pitfall of online catalogs which we will also have to accept; much of the physical exercise that we used to get running around in the library will be lost” (p.141).
Based on one morning’s attempts at information retrieval, I would have to
tentatively conclude that Ted Gup’s anxiety about his sons’ loss of serendipity
is based on an overly optimistic estimation of the efficiency of database
searching. In fact, if anything, the
Internet opens the door to a far wider array of sources than leafing through a
volume of the World Book Encyclopedia
would provide. Granted, the filter is
different; the encyclopedia’s filter
comes from limiting all entries to alphabetical order, whereas the Internet’s
comes from the existence of a certain keyword somewhere in the text of the
article (or other website, like that of the nudist colony). However, it seems that, at least in this
case, the fear of excessive and restrictive control that Gup finds in the
efficiency of information technology is mitigated by the inevitable workings of
chaos.
References
Gup, T. (1997). The End of Serendipity. In L. Kirszner and S. Mandell (eds.),
The Blair Reader (4th ed., pp. 478-481). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Liestman, D. (1992). Chance in the midst of design: Approaches to library
research serendipity. RQ, 31 (4), 524-533.
Rice, J. (1988, Feb. 15). Serendipity and Holism: The Beauty of OPACs. Library Journal 113, 139-141.