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How do you handle information overload?

Anne Taylor-Vaisey asked an interesting question of her CE Awareness Yahoo group that I thought would be good to ask here as well.

In the four months since Capsules started, Anne and I have posted 255 items. That's almost 64 per month, on average, and most included links to other articles or resources. As Anne asked her CE group, I'll ask you: "What did we do with all this information? Did we read it all? File away the messages in electronic folders? Print some of it out and file it in paper files? Forget about it? How much did we actually get out of all this stuff? What did we do with the ideas we got while reading at least some of the messages?"

Anne says she captured most of the citations in a Reference Manager database, and most of the PDFs in a folder on my hard drive. She then linked citations to articles so that she has a nice searchable database with links to full text. Then she asks, "But so what? I can find things again, but what happened to all the ideas I got when I initially found these treasures? I may have bibliographic control, but what about idea control?

"How do we move from 'digital stockpiling,' which is what most of us do, to saving and sharing the 'gems' and converting them to 'job-ready knowledge'?"

In the hope of making this a better resource for all, I'd love to know what you have learned from this site, and what, if anything, you've done with what you learned. Please take a moment to e-mail me your response, or leave it in the comments section below. Thanks!

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