Monday, April 28, 2014

Call for proposals - ebrowsing (Association of College & Research Libraries Conference is in Portland, OR, March 25-28, 2015)

We are seeking scholars and specialists inside and outside the traditional boundaries of library scholarship to join our proposed panel discussion on the challenges and failures of browsing in today's electronic environment at The Association of College & Research Libraries Conference is in Portland, OR, March 25-28, 2015.

Procedure -  Please email Kate Joranson, k.joranson@gmail.com briefly describing your interest in the topic as well as your professional background. Upon acceptance, we will work with you to develop questions to shape the panel's discussion.

Deadline - Monday May 5

Summary of Proposed Panel -

Browsing is an essential component to discovery, yet these terms have become conflated. From library databases to online shopping, our ability to effectively browse for content has become hampered by an excessive focus on searchability. This panel will cultivate a discussion of the potential for browsing in the electronic environment, cultivated serendipity, and curiosity.

This panel will bring together experts from inside and outside of libraries to discuss why electronic browsing is broken and how, or if, it can be fixed. The panelists will briefly present their perspective on the problems of electronic browsing and then will participate in a conversation facilitated by the moderator. Questions to be addressed by all panelists include:

    Where do we place the burden for facilitating discovery?
    Why/how are our databases failing us/our users and what do they need to do differently?
    What do you wish were possible in an ebrowsing and discovery environment? Why is this not possible?
    What is preventing a more creative approach to electronic browsing and discovery?

Through these questions and discussions we hope to drive at the heart of the problems of electronic browsing in our current digital library environment, and to understand how our discovery systems arrived where they are today (search-focused) and how we might reset the balance between search and browse in the discovery experience.

Nina Clements, Steve VanTuyl, and Kate Joranson are project collaborators at ebrowsing.org