Haystack : Per-User Information Environments MIT 9904-08 Proposal for 1999-2000 Funding
The World-Wide Web will soon be a powerful and dynamic replacement for today’s libraries and museums—public repositories of communal knowledge. But is this enough? Is this all that the electronic infrastructure can be? Libraries are huge, filled with masses of data irrelevant to any query. They are impersonal, presenting every user with the same information regardless of their background and interests. For these reasons, libraries are typically the last place we turn in seeking information. We start closer to home, with our own bookshelves. These are hand-selected and customorganized collections of the information most relevant to us as individuals. If we cannot find what we seek on our own bookshelves, we turn next to colleagues, friends, and associates---trusted members of communities with interests common to ours. It is only after exhausting these resources that we go to the library.