Choose your platform.
I'm well aware that I'm confusing my metaphors here. A single document can
hold a great deal of information, but a folder can do the same, as can, of course,
a hard drive. If our search tools are good enough, it really doesn't matter where
a snippet of information is stored. If we can find it, it really doesn't matter
whether it's part of a larger collection of individual notes, or part of a single
document. And if that's the case, the distinction between a page in a book and an entire bookshelf is rather artificial. They're both part of the same continuum.
Bookshelves that brought together works on a similar topic so
that they would be accessible to us from the same place were a wonderful invention.
It's hard to imagine the march of human knowledge without libraries. But before the
technology for connecting between non-physically adjacent items was available,
Vannevar Bush was already focusing not only the achievements of libraries and bookshelves,
but also on their shortcomings. As useful as it might have been for organizing
human knowledge, the bookshelf, simply as a result of the physicality of the books
on those shelves, permitted multiple connectivity on only a very limited scale.
Go to: Doing things the hard way.