Writing a Book on Faceted Search

I’ve been slowly telling friends and family about my upcoming project, but now that it’s published online, I thought I’d share the news more publicly: I’m writing a book about faceted search. It will be part of the Morgan & Claypool series of Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services, edited by none other than Gary Marchionini.

I discovered this series a few months ago, when Gary recruited me to review another book in the series, a lecture on exploratory search by Ryen White and Resa Roth. Perhaps my most significant contribution was to suggest the subtitle they ultimately used.

In any case, I was impressed with the book and more generally with the series, so I humbly asked Gary what might be involved in contributing to it. The next thing I knew, I was signing a  contract to write a book on faceted search!

I’m very excited about this book, even though I’m aware that it will take a toll on the rest of my personal and professional life as I work on it. I’m grateful to Gary and to the folks at Morgan & Claypool for giving me the chance to write it. I do ask your indulgence as readers if I slow down a bit as I divert some of my cycles to writing rather than blogging. I’ll try to make up for it by sharing some of my observations about the differences between blogging and old-fashioned writing.