So I'm reading this book, Ambient Findability, (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596007655/sr=8-1/qid=1156519707/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-4241351-0343320?ie=UTF8) for my class and it is making me think I may actually belong in library school after all. To be quite honest, I am irritated by public relations, bored by management, and mystified by cataloging. Many parts of library school are an endurance test for me. In this book, however, Peter Morville talks about what I am interested in anyway, and in a way that not only interests me, but gives me hope for both my future as a library & information professional and as a relatively mentally healthy human being.

When people come up to the Reference Desk in a library, they want to know something that is represented by some kind of symbolic language; words, numbers, pictures, or musical notation. Tragicomically, the only tools library patrons have at their disposal are more words, numbers, pictures, etc. Usually just words. The space between what the patron wants and the words they use to ask is my favorite space in the library. Really, it is the reason I want to work here. I love trying to figure out why in the world people ask for things in the way that they do. How does anyone ever say what they mean? Then again, if "what we mean" are just thoughts made of more words and pictures and symbols...

Anyway, (actually maybe this is completely unrelated) this Morville book is fantastic because he touches on everything I feel and see when I think of the ways the Internet is changing people and the world. He draws lines between evolutionary psychology and the way we use technology to seek information. Our tools change much faster than we change. Human evolution has left us adapted to an environment that no longer resembles the one in which we live. Yet, this technology that is changing our environment has been designed by human minds and hands with the adaptations gained through all those years of evolution. Whew. When we sit down at a computer to find a "commodify your dissent" t-shirt, or a Russian cult film from the 80s on IMDB, or shop for vintage Volkswagon parts, our searching strategies are informed by survival behaviors and instincts developed millions of years ago for finding mammoths to kill or protecting ourselves and our young from being skewered or trampled. Morville thinks web designers need to study the actual information seeking behaviors of real people and design with those needs in mind.