Finding information
Explore how societies organised growing collections so that the right record, book, page or website could be found again. This pathway follows the main changes in chronological order and shows which older practices continued beside them.
How did stored information become findable?
Five turning points
Libraries and catalogues
A library places works in relation to other works, enabling comparison, commentary, synthesis and cumulative scholarship. Catalogues let users search for items they cannot directly inspect and often do not know exactly how to name.
Open topic →Search Engines
Without automated discovery, a rapidly growing network becomes a warehouse with the lights off and the labels removed. Users can express an information need rather than supply an exact host, path or document identifier.
Open topic →Follow the history from beginning to present
Libraries and catalogues
Libraries transform many separate works into a navigable body of knowledge.
Search Engines
A search engine is an automated discovery system that acquires information about a corpus, constructs one or more indexes, interprets a query, retrieves candidate items and orders or filters results.