Ye olde information overload
Information overload isn’t solely a Google-era dilemma. Before digital technology existed, scholars beat their desks in frustration over information overload, too, according to Ann Blair. In her book, “Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age,” Blair, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, examines the painstaking processes early scholars undertook for the sake of knowledge. With the spread of paper in the late middle ages, then of printing after 1453, scholarship involved ever more reading: printed books, manuscripts, and letters. Scholars relied on note taking to retain what was useful from their reading. Some collections of notes, organized with finding devices, were published as reference books, in which readers could find the best bits from many books they wouldn’t have the time or accessibility to read. Blair set out to examine these early printed “reference books” — even though that term didn’t exist as such at the time, she notes...