Historical research rarely delivers any clear lessons for the present. The story of the management of textual information in personal notes and printed reference books, 1500–1700, could be presented as a decline narrative from the heights of great learning to an increasing reliance on shortcuts and substitutes, or alternatively, as a triumphalist account of new methods democratized and made increasingly sophisticated. Similarly, among those reflecting on current and future developments, the doomsayers on the one hand and the info-boosters on the other often seem the loudest voices. I have tried to steer clear of such extreme positions, although I am conscious of having leaned more toward an optimistic stance because I am confident that new research tools and techniques can both enhance our ability to do thoughtful scholarly work and widen access to learning for broader audiences. The decline narrative has been in use for centuries and continues to appeal today, often fueled by general anxieties rather than specific changes. But given the long history of the trope, it seems no more appropriate to our context than it does to the Renaissance or the Middle Ages when it was used so extensively.

Technology still has its limits. In my line of work, no tools exist to stand in for personal mastery of one’s subject matter and careful judgment, informed by contextual understanding. Human attention is one of our most precious commodities and many forces compete for it with an ingenious range of software and hardware devices. Even while information storage has been delegated to other media, human memory still plays a crucial role in recalling what to attend to, and when and how. Similarly, judgment is as central as ever in selecting, assessing, and synthesizing information to create knowledge responsibly. The opportunities to settle for misleading or partial information, and to rely on snippets turned up by an Internet search without attending to their context, have never been more abundant. Whereas early modern reference books were criticized for failing to yield material on a topic of interest, an Internet search invariably offers results. Whether those results are good or not depends on our skills in optimizing searches and assessing results. Those skills themselves will require constant honing, in response to changes in the search engines and in the material available for searching. While a savvy user of early modern reference books needed to be familiar with a fairly stable canon of authors quoted and of finding devices, a skilled Internet user must assess an ever-broadening range of materials that can appear on a list of results, from shopping sites to blogs, from government agencies to elaborate scams. With the digitization of massive amounts of printed matter it will be useful (and perhaps increasingly difficult to younger generations) to understand the tools and categories of the world of print, including reference books, library catalogs, indexes, and the conventions of different genres, which are obscured by their presentation in electronic form.¹