In preparation for the CACUL teleconference on Google scholar, I read widely about the future direction of search.
The following books were especially formative: UBC Professor of Literacy and Technology John Willinsky’s The Access Principle; David Weinberger’s dense Small Pieces, Loosely Joined; and librarian Peter Morville‘s fascinating Ambient Findability.
UBC Google scholar blog is fortunate to talk to and interview Peter Morville, President of Semantic Studios about findability, his book, and the future of libraries. Peter Morville will also be speaking in Vancouver (as will Weinberger) for the ASIS&T Seventh Information Architecture Summit, March 23-27th, 2006.
****************************************
1. Where did you get the idea for the title of your book – Ambient Findability ?
PETER : My participation in two conferences in 2002 led to the book’s title. First, at the Information Architecture Summit in Baltimore, I realized I felt trapped by the boundaries of my own field, and discovered that “findability” best captured my cross-disciplinary, transmedia interests in wayfinding, search, navigation, and retrieval. Second, at the AIGA Experience Design Summit in Las Vegas, David Rose delivered a brilliant show-and-tell featuring Ambient Devices. I’m not sure exactly when my brain made the strange connection between the terms, but a few months later I wrote an article called Ambient Findability. The phrase has been lodged in my head ever since.
********************
2. You discuss controlled vocabularies near the end of AF, yet provide evidence suggesting the simple keyword has primacy. Won’t it become more difficult to find anything as the Web grows, scaling up to 100 or 1000 billion documents?
PETER : That’s a big question! To some extent, the answer depends on the query. If I’m looking for a few good documents on a topic, Google’s multi-algorithmic solution that combines relevance and popularity metrics will probably do just fine, though we may find ourselves entering more than 2.53 keywords per search to improve precision. But if I’m looking for a specific document, it may become difficult to provide enough keywords to disambiguate the target document from a million other similar documents. Authors and publishers will increasingly need to rely on statistically improbable phrases (SIPs) and unique identification systems (ISBN for the masses) to make their content findable.
********************
3. We are moving into the post Web 1.0 era, and into Web 2.0 – the web as platform, as community centre and as conduit for collaboration and power decentralization. What comes after Web 2.0? Web 3.0?
PETER : I don’t like the term Web 2.0. It’s a pointer to an arbitrary grab bag of trends and technologies, and I sincerely hope we don’t have to suffer through Web 3.0. I do see the Web becoming both interface and infrastructure for an Internet of Objects we can barely imagine. I see Spime, Everyware , Blogjects and UFOs. I see man-machine borders blurring as we implant devices and offload memories, which leads us to the next question.
********************
4. How will human intelligence be shaped by our ability to find? (Our parents read & memorized; we were taught to think; will millennials be taught to find at the expense of reading, writing, thinking? Most college students can’t tell the difference between a catalogue/index/search engine – everything is about IM & Google)
PETER : I’m convinced that search skills and information literacy will grow as a source of individual competitive advantage in the coming years. The ability to find, evaluate, and select useful information is a core competency of the knowledge worker, and this only becomes more true in a world where we can increasingly select our sources and choose our news. Since we use people to find content and content to find people, our social networks will also be important. So, we’ll be focusing our intelligence in different ways, and our brains will probably be wired differently as a result. Or at least that will be true for our children. It may be too late for us.
********************
5. What is the likely result of zero findability in some parts of the world? I am thinking specifically of haves/have nots; those affected by the digital divide. For example, those affected by Hurricane Katrina, tsunamis, war in Iraq, etc. I think Microsoft and Google have the right idea (to help bridge the divide).
PETER : The “print divide” is arguably much worse than the “digital divide.” Books and journals are horribly expensive, unfindable, and inaccessible to the majority of the world’s population. Fortunately, both divides will mostly disappear in the next five to ten years. Cheap computing and communication devices, ubiquitous, fault-tolerant connectivity, mass digitization projects like Google Book Search, and improved usability will bring an amazing wealth of information, services, and opportunities to all corners of the globe. People will have access. But they will also need food, shelter, medicine, education, transportation, and other services we take for granted. Findability can’t solve all the world’s problems. But it can help.
********************
6. In last month’s Information Today Libraries Embracing Change, librarians are accused of missing the boat; we’ve done a lousy job of communicating our value. What should librarians be doing to reverse that?
PETER : I don’t agree with all these indictments of librarianship that emphasize a failure to communicate value. Can you blame the demise of the Pony Express on bad marketing? The Web has dramatically changed the way we create, publish, find, and consume information. Defining the role and value of libraries in this new era is tremendously difficult, particularly when the world won’t stand still. It’s a co-evolutionary process that will continue to unfold for the rest of our lives.
Peter concludes, “So far, I think libraries and librarians have responded remarkably well”
One of the more amusing requests that librarians get (and not just medical librarians) is to search by colour. “Can you help me find this book…it’s dark green, and about yay high”? Admittedly, in the digital world, this is happening less but the question still arises, much to our amusement. The wild thing is, we can sometimes remember titles by visual clues.
Despite it being the 
1. Walton G et al. 
3. Thomas K. Moveable feast. Information World Review (January 2006): 19-20.
5. Schuerenberg BK. 
An issue came up today during my 
The 
Canadian Association of College and University Libraries – Teleconference Series
The