Gaining an insight into the ordering, structuring and dissemination of knowledge in the eighteenth century is key to the wider context of Sloane’s collecting. Blair (2010) recognises that the sense of ‘information overload’ is not distinct to our modern period, but was an important issue for scholars in the early modern period and explores the techniques which scholars adopted in order to make sense of a wide variety of information to help piece together knowledge. Donald (2005) takes an alternative approach, questioning whether or not the enlightenment was an era where knowledge was ordered, suggesting instead that the enlightenment was more chaotic than originally believed. 

Blair, A.M., (2010), Too much to know: managing scholarly information before the modern age. Yale University Press, USA.

Charmantier, I. and Müller-Wille, S., (2014) ‘Carl Linnaeus’s botanical paper slips (1767-1773)’. Intellectual Historical Review 24:2, pp.215-238.

Donald, D and O’Gorman, F., (2005) Ordering the world in the eighteenth century. Palgrave Macmillan.

MacGregor, A et al., (2000) Manuscript catalogues of the early Museum collections 1683-1886. Archaeopress, Oxford.

Margócsy, Daniel, (2010) ‘“Refer to folio and number”: encyclopedias, the exchange of curiosities, and practices of identification before Linnaeus’. Journal of the History of Ideas 71:1, pp.63-89.

Müller-Wille, S. and Charmantier, I., (2012) ‘Natural history and information overload: the case of Linnaeus’. Studies in the history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences 43, pp.4-15.

Roos, Anna Marie and Keller, Vera and Yale, Beth (2017) Archival afterlives. Life, death, and knowledge-making in early modern British scientific and medical archives. Brill, Leiden.

Rudy, Seth (2014) Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge. Palgrave Macmillan.

Sheehan, Jonathan, and Dror Wahrman (2015) Invisible Hands: Self-organisation and the Eighteenth Century; University of Chicago Press, USA.

Silver, Sean (2015) The Mind is a Collection. University of Pennysylvania Press, USA.

Siskin, Clifford (2017) System: The Making of Modern Knowledge. MIT Press,  USA.

Stalnaker, J., (2010) The unfinished Enlightenment: description in the age of the encyclopaedia. Cornell University Press, USA.

Sundberg Wall, C., (2006) The prose of things: transformations of description in the eighteenth century. University of Chicago Press, USA.

Yeo, Richard (2013) Notebooks, English Virtuosi and Early Modern Science. Chicago University Press, USA.