Serendipitous Information Retrieval

The acquisition of information is generally thought to be deliberately sought using a search or query mechanism or by browsing or scanning an information space. People, however, find information without seeking it through accidental, incidental or serendipitous discoveries, often in combination with other information acquisition episodes. The value of this phenomenon to an individual or an organization can be equated with the impact of serendipitous breakthroughs in science and medicine. Although largely ignored in information systems development and research, serendipitous retrieval complements querying and browsing, and together they provide a holistic, ecological approach to information acquisition and define the key approaches to a digital library. In this paper, the concept of serendipitous information retrieval is introduced and validated with data from a study of news readers, along with some approaches for how to facilitate it.