• 20Aug

    The Largest Mess

    2009 Information Calendar, About information No Comments

    From the 2009 EMC Information Calendar: “The Internet is the world’s largest library. It’s just that all the books are on the floor.” -John Allen Paulos

    “If you look at the physical assets of an organization, they’re very carefully managed. Like the stock in a grocery store. They know exactly what they have. They have it appropriately arrayed on their shelves. They get new stock when they need it. If you look at that same organization in terms of their information resources, it’s as if you backed a truck up into the back of the store and dumped out all the groceries and said ‘Okay, we’re open for business.’” -Bob Boiko, author of Laughing at the CIO

  • 19Aug

    Death by Information Overload

    2009 Information Calendar, Information Overload No Comments

    In the “Book Collection that Devoured My Life,” Luc Sante wrote about his life as a collector of books:

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  • 02Jul

    Books for our time

    2009 Information Calendar, Digital Culture No Comments

    Newsweek recently published a list of 100 books that “open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways.” It’s great to see that we covered in ON two of the top ten: Nick Carr’s The Big Switch and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.

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  • 30Jun

    Man of information

    2009 Information Calendar No Comments

    “Mr. Martin, I suppose, is not a man of information beyond the line of his own business? He does not read?”

     

    “Oh yes!-that is, no-I do not know-but I believe he has read a good deal-but not what you would think any thing of. He reads the Agricultural Reports, and some other books that lay in one of the window seats-but he reads all them to himself. But sometimes of an evening, before we went to cards, he would read something aloud out of the Elegant Extracts, very entertaining.”

     

    Jane Austen, Emma, 1815.

     

    “The apothecary had an idea that I was actually dead. This idea I endeavored to confute, kicking and plunging with all my might, and making the most furious contortions-for the operations of the surgeon had, in a measure, restored me to the possession of my faculties. All, however, was attributed to the effects of a new galvanic battery, wherewith the apothecary, who is really a man of information, performed several curious experiments, in which, from my personal share in their fulfillment, I could not help feeling deeply interested.”

     

    Edgar Allan Poe, “Loss of Breath,” 1832.

     

     —From the 2009 EMC Information Calendar

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