Scrapbook as info resource?

I have stacks of stuff I've decided to keep "as reference" - articles on healthy foods, articles for what to do in various kinds of emergencies, home health, lots of bits of information that I think could be useful in some story or another - not just the biomes but heraldry, horses, falconing, technology tid bits, culture and psychology. A bunch of clippings with mostly textual information, some sketches or pictures, not the pretty scrap book of today's craft and art, and yet it could be done in a decorative way. Pictures related to the topic at hand, pictures to help find the topic quickly... And like the pictures, they don't have to hand straight. The variety of text fonts, styles, and sizes would add visual interest, just like notes and sketches in the classic travel journal and research journal in days before computers and cheap cameras.

Of course, the sorting is more difficult than any trip or family scrapbook: information on a thousand topics is not easily sorted. The computer has made sorting so easy - alphabetize one minute, categorize and sort again in a few steps, date order or priority order or something else more mechanical but drop and drag and done. Sheets can be sorted in most scrapbook albums, but deciding is challenging, and getting it right manually, one page at a time leaves lots of room for error. Two sided pages adds another challenge unless every little grouping takes an even number of sides.

If it's more focused--a hobby, a more specific interest--maybe the order doesn't matter so much. A small press published a book on dragons that looked like the classic researchers journal with sketches, folded maps, notes about the clippings and sketches as well as observations. It was a cool looking book, fun to page through, very tactile, and the sequence didn't matter at all. Stop and read at any point, page through forward and back, add your own notes and clippings from magazines and newspapers... That's a real journal, and a wonderful sort of scrapbook that we sometimes forget with all the decorative borders and stickers. The stickers with the quotes are more the thing, but clippings from catalogs, newspapers and magazines and short commentary thereon (my historic heart says date it) or personally selected quotes, hand copied or transcribed is more the thing, and ideally with a dip pen and ink (okay, that's a personal preference, my favorite way to write though not all papers can handle the liquid ink). Paging through that to find information I personally found and selected, that's a feeling that no amount of computer queries can provide. And as historian, i can imagine the sense of personal history than even a primarily informational collection can provide, spiced as it were with opinions as much as choices, observations and experience as well as the information that was available to the person at the time. All the queries of resources, even date indexed, won't give that, and touching that collection, seeing the flourishes in the writing, or stiff printing with an awkward hand, even a finely detailed blog or on line journal can't quite capture that personal touch, that sense of presence that lingers in things that people have touched.

Scrapbook as history, too.