Cimorene

no, that's fine, i've had some family friends in library sciences. i grew up in alabama where the public library was a giant joke, but i have some very happy memories of the university of alabama's library (which for a large research institution's was terrible but compared to the public library was, you know, hundreds of times superior). and i indeed got LOTS of mileage from serendipitious browsing--whether you are trying to find out more about a subject from interest or doing a research project, being able to flip through, say, every book on the subject and then move on to closely related ones all right there is a valuable... feature.