What Makes Personal Library Science a Science?

In the world of science, we have natural sciences and we have engineering sciences, and both have a divergence in terms of their core purpose.

Natural sciences are meant to explain natural phenomena that already exist from a mathematical perspective, and engineering sciences are meant to create structures around the existing frameworks to build off of them and create something new.

A shared goal of both sciences is to make hypotheses and then test against those hypotheses. And then make better experiments that are reproducible.

I think as a science, personal library science is somewhere in between psychology and computer science.

It's related to psychology because it's heavily invested in how a person views themselves as well as the mental structures of their own understanding of what's important and relevant in the world.

It's related to computer science because you can make objective claims about how to organize data in a way that it's best retrievable and useful for secondary functions like synthesizing and sharing.

A good collection of unanswered questions in personal library science might include:

• Is there an optimal way to store text, images, and audio/video data?
• Is there an optimal way to search for said data?
• What percent does a person's memory improve or degrade by the existence of having a personal library?
• How do we collate the data in a personal library and use it to do data science to notice trends and patterns?
• What are the foundations of sharing data from a personal library, whether it's one-on-one, one-to-a-small-group, or broadcasting to everyone?
• How fast or how slow should a personal library grow over a person's lifetime?
• What type of data is most evergreen? What type of data is least evergreen?
• How did the internet affect a person's own thoughts on what their personal library looks like?
• At what exact point do tags fall apart in utility in terms of scaling a personal library?
• What happens to a person's personal library after they die? Does it pass down to their children, or is it given to the public?
• What sources provide the best density for a personal library?
• How do we judge the health of a personal library?
• Is social media robbing us of the agency of our personal libraries?
• What rate of consumption is correct in terms of the personal library's health?
• ...

I think now is the time to tackle some of these questions, especially as the world of information becomes more and more fractured. We need to start formalizing the utility and purposes of a personal library, so that each person can retain the dignity and agency over their informational diet.