Ways of knowing

A paraphrase of something I wrote in 1997:

Human societies have two ways of storing knowledge: Written down in libraries, archives, etc.; and memorized in people's minds.

The amount of knowledge that is written down is ever-increasing, but the amount that an individual can memorize is biologically limited.

Managing that growing disparity will require better searching and cataloging methods to help transfer knowledge from where it is stored to where it is needed.