For a textbook this book was actually pretty good. ( )

Ambient Findability by Peter Morville is often used as a textbook in the reference course I took. The professor I took it from didn't include the book but the title and the fact that it was published by O'Reilly Media piqued my interest enough to want to read it as the class was starting up.

Although the description mentions information overload, the book isn't really about that. It's about how information and people hook up. There is the information that one seeks and that which falls into one's lap.

Morville begins his book by wondering how the reader has come across his book. He goes on to wonder if anyone will find his book.

Much of the book is a discussion on techniques of cataloguing information so it can be found again. It isn't though an SEO recipe book. Instead it is a call for professionalism, consistency and intelligence behind how information is gathered, sorted and marked for retrieval.

I read a library book via interlibrary loan. Someday I would like my own copy. ( )

I used this book before for my course on information architecture but I also found it now relevant for my research on categorisation of information objects. I think this can be used in combination with his first book, ˜Information Architecture for the WWW™. In this book, Morville (2005, p. 139) argues that œontologies, taxonomies, and folksonomies are not mutually exclusive. However a closer examination of this book shows that Morville is rather a staunchest critic of user-generated metadata approaches. He likes to call it mob indexing, a term which shows a certain intended bias against socially-generated metadata approaches. Plus, he tries to delineate that such metadata has its appropriate place in the blogosphere and social media environments and not entirely in portals and digital libraries. Overall, this is an interesting read and it touches a host of topics, very good illustrations, not the least the lemur on its cover. ( )

This is a book on purposeful use of information, in searching and finding kinds of situations, and particularly what Internet and the new media mean for searching and finding. It covers a very broad range of topics, including location-based services, ubicomp, social media and more, from the perspective of information architecture and information retrieval. It seems to be written mostly for information architects, but it might also be useful to interaction designers who need to strengthen their foundations in information-centered approaches.

A delightful essay on findability in the age of ambient presence. Morville is co-author of the authoritative "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web". I wanted to read this slimmer volume to see if there was something for a course I am co-designing in "content management," and, indeed, Ch 5-6 may be the relatively succinct explanation of findability, and then the whole mess of metadata including a very clear, very brief explanation of why the semantic web is unlikely to take off but really matters sometimes, and how the worlds of taxonomy clash with folksonomy and why both matter. Clearest short explanation of RDF and triples and why they matter I've seen in a while. May be worth having students read those chapters instead of struggling through IA for the WWW. ( )