Editorial: Serendipity and information discovery

It is somewhat paradoxical to imagine not only that serendipity can have an important role in information discovery, but that may also be able to nurture serendipitous events. By its nature serendipity implies the kinds of chance or coincidence that are beyond self-conscious engineering. It also implies a haphazard approach to information organisation and discovery that runs counter to the well-drilled training of information of professionals in the organisation, classification, and categorisation of information. Yet the role of serendipity in information retrieval has been recognised for decades, and when managing the highly structured data sets of the contemporary digital information scape, strategies for maximising serendipitous information discovery have become more important than ever. Resisting the temptation to minutely engineer search strategies can improve the chances of finding not only the information we want, but the information we need. Writing in 1946 about his imagined Memex machine, the US polymath Vannevar Bush described the experience of trying to find information using the then tradition hierarchical structures of analytical indexing: