Desire Paths in the Information Landscape

Abstract

Libraries and archives serve so many different users who come to information institutions with various perspectives, needs, experiences, and desires around accessing physical or digital collections. While our users may find what they are looking for immediately, many have to beat their own paths through complex systems and metadata that doesn’t align with their needs. Their search strategies may leave digital “desire paths”–alternative routes through the information landscape that can show us how to better meet their needs. This article covers three scenarios where users’ desire paths can be seen or where gaps around user experience can be better addressed. Through an analysis of institutional accessibility statements, queer archival experiences, and the affordances of volunteer crowdsourcing, the authors investigate desire paths in the information landscape and what practitioners and scholars can learn from them. This article also takes a highly experimental approach to scholarly collaboration, by revealing rather than concealing our writing process through the use of different fonts to represent the different makers of this piece: we preserve our comments, feedback, corrections, discussions, and the evolving perspectives of the authors, reviewers, and editors. Artifacts of collaboration are often invisible and obscure the many kinds of work and thinking that goes into a piece of writing. By making this process visible, we make our shared desire path visible to you, dear reader, and invite you to walk it, too.