I recently stopped by Barnes & Noble on the way to the airport to pick up a copy of Peter Morville’s book on information architecture and user experience, Ambient Findability.

The book is pretty widely discussed in certain circles, so buying online is as easy as clicking a link, or at most, a quick visit to Amazon.com. But the process of finding a copy in a physical environment is not quite as straightforward.

For a search user, the online experience is very direct: at bn.com, the search result page gets the job done, even though it doesn’t provide you with a breadcrumb or other indication of where this title was located. There’s an indication of relationship — two categories (Networking & Telecommunications and Computers — General & Miscellaneous) are listed as “Related Subjects”, but a sense of context is generally missing here.

Back in the brick and mortar retail environment, I’ve bypassed the title search kiosk, preferring to wander along the rows of shelves and browse other potentially interesting titles at the same time. Task-oriented but with a little to burn. My intuition says to look in the computer science area for a shelf or two on web design and marketing. No luck.

So I broaden the search, now taking in the wider scope of internet-specific titles — software, databases, networks. Many of these books are by AF’s publisher, O’Reilly, so I’m hopeful it’s the right neighborhood. But now I’m covering a full aisle, so when I come up short on the first try, I’m willing to look through the stacks one more time. Nada.

Fast forward through the entire Computer Science section, then five aisles over to Business & Marketing, and then en route to the Science & Technology. That’s when I switch the object of the search from a book title to a helpful sales associate.

That’s an easier find. He’s quite helpful, looking up the title (yes, it’s in Science and Technology), and between the two of us we’re able to pick out the title, a single copy tucked in between an oversize tome on nanotechnology and a selection on robotics. From my perspective, an odd placement, but then again, the book is categorized by its publisher under “Technology/Marketing and Society”.

It’s the integration of data search and physical safari that produced results and made a sale. At the checkout counter, the cashier asks, “Were you able to find everything you’re looking for?” And in spite of the preconceptions and personalized taxonomies that I carried into the store, the answer was indeed, “Yes.”