What we think about when we think about personal libraries, some thoughts from librarian Tracy Seneca.
To be honest, the search strategies that librarians teach are often not the methods we ourselves use to find information. If we consciously track our own behavior, we’ll find that we still get a great deal of our published information by accident and by referral. But more importantly, the text that is “about your topic” may very well not be the text that inspires you – that makes you see something in a new way. Sometimes we learn most from texts we disagree with, or our innovations come from seeing a connection between texts and ideas that no one else has put together before. [unalog]