Knowledge Organization Quotes

While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.

It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.

When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.

It's very useful to have a good grasp of all the big ideas in hard and soft science. A, it gives perspective. B, it gives a way for you to organize and file away experience in your head, so to speak.

All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.

Library Science is the key to all science, just as mathematics is its language - and civilization will rise or fall, depending on how well librarians do their jobs.

Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I'm always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.

I suppose we all share this pipe-dream of being able to reach out a hand and find anything at will; what is amazing is that we think that good filing could somehow make it comes true. On the contrary: putting a letter into a filing system is like releasing your ferret in the Hampton Court maze.

Organize first for knowledge, first with the object of making us know ourselves as a nation, for we have to do that before we canbe of value to other nations of the world and then organize to accomplish the things that you decide to want. Anddon't make decisions with the interest of youth alone before you. Make your decisions because they are good for the nation as a whole.

The great scientific revolution is still to come. It will ensue when men collectively organize their knowledge for application to achieve and make secure social values; when they systematically use scientific procedures for the control of human relationships and the direction or the social affairs of our vast technological machinery.

The multiplicity of facts and writings is become so great that every thing must soon be reduced to extracts and dictionaries.

The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.

What men need is, as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organize into a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning .

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them.

So, that notion of hypertext seemed to me immediately obvious because footnotes were already the ideas wriggling, struggling to get free, like a cat trying to get out of your arms.

Here, then, is the point at which I see the new mission of the librarian rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, the librarian has been principally occupied with the book as a thing, as a material object. From now on he must give his attention to the book as a living function. He must become a policeman, master of the raging book.

Curation comes up when search stops working.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

The librarian's mission should be, not like up to now, a mere handling of the book as an object, but rather a know how (mise au point) of the book as a vital function.

[Librarians] study their field with as much determination and as much delight as open-heart surgeons.

To all librarians everywhere, God bless you.

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known.

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

Your mind is a cupboard and you stock the shelves.

Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom.