Seeking Serendipity through Knowledge Organisation: Creating a Knowledge Infrastructure for Surprising, Meaningful Discoveries through Browsing

In the field of Human Information Interaction, research on search has often overshadowed that of browsing. This is despite the importance of browsing for supporting people when they don’t necessarily know what they’re looking for and its potential for facilitating surprising, meaningful discoveries as a result. New search paradigms, such as AI-facilitated dialogues and automated information synthesis approaches also threaten to steal the limelight from browsing as an important ‘serendipity engine.’ We should not let this happen; the Knowledge Organisation community has a vital role to play in supporting all forms of knowledge discovery, including browsing. In this session, I will first propose that the community already has the necessary ‘building blocks’ of knowledge organisation to better support the making of surprising, meaningful discoveries through browsing. We will then explore, through an interactive discussion and co-creation exercise, what might make connections surprising and meaningful and how to facilitate making them through better knowledge organisation.