Interiority: Thinking Like an Information Seeker
- Interiority: A Library Phenomenon
- Interiority: Looking Within the Local Library
- Interiority: Thinking Like an Information Seeker
- Interiority: Librarians Undressed
- Interiority: The Second Life of Fiction
- Interiority: The Incompleteness Theorem of Library Science
- Interiority: To the Core and Back Out Into the World
After walking through the doors of the library, the patron begins a search for information. The patron does not know or care much about about the organizational systems devised by librarians. The foremost thought in the mind of the information seeker is a quality or a question, perhaps half-formed. This is one reason why a library needs both books and computers. The physical relationship between books on shelves and pages in books are well suited to stumbling upon an answer when people take a swing in its general direction. Search engines are better for hunting down specific items.
A theory on the organization of information is really a theory of mind. Any particular system — be it the Dewey Decimal System or hyperlinks — is an attempt to make information findable by information seekers. The system assumes a knowledge of how people approach information. Next time you are looking at the library shelves or the on-line catalog, consider that what you are really seeing is a model of the patron’s mind: their cognitive architecture, their world view, their interiority. The organization of information is a psychological theory and can benefit from all the research in cognitive psychology which treats the mind as an information processing device. Research on attention and pattern recognition will be of special significance.
Cognitive psychologists model the mind as a semantic network not unlike the topography of the web. The semantic links between web pages are a simple form of the complex connections between neurons in the brain. This structure is one reason the web is amenable to people seeking information. Hyperlinks and social tagging represent meaningful connections in the mind of people, and the usefulness of this data to others is the insight of Web 2.0 and Libray 2.0.
The correspondence between the web and the mind is limited, more of a metaphor. Consider that links and tags are always assigned after information is found, when the author’s mindset is quite different than the information seeker. “Readlater” tags are not useful to the patron in information discovery mode.
We have had a peek into the mind of the information seeker. In the next post, I will talk about the personality of librarians and readers.
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