A presentation faculty on practices and applications for personal knowledge management

1. Going With the Flow: Tips and Tools for
Managing the Information Deluge

3. “It’s a mistake to assume that as filters improve
they have the effect of reducing the information we
have to look at. As today’s filters improve, they
expand the information we feel compelled to take
notice of. Yes, they winnow out the uninteresting
stuff (imperfectly), but they deliver a vastly greater
supply of interesting stuff. And precisely because
the information is of interest to us, we feel pressure
to attend to it. As a result, our sense of overload
increases.”
Nicholas Carr

5. Too Much to Read?
• “Of making many books there is no end; and
much study is a weariness of the flesh.”
Ecclesiastes 12:2
• Distringit librorum multitudo
Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, Liber I
• “The horrible mass of books keeps growing.”
Gottfried Leibniz, 1680

6. Late Medieval/Early Modern Tools for
Managing Information
• punctuation/spacing
• indexes (alphabetical/subject)
• concordances
• bibliographies (annotated)
• compilations
• commonplace books
• periodical book reviews
• encyclopedias
• footnotes/citational logic
• library cataloguing and classification systems

7. The “Library Problem”
“The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we
publish unduly in view of the extent and variety
of present-day interests, but rather that
publication has been extended far beyond our
present ability to make real use of the record.”
Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” (1945)