Sri Lanka, April 28 -- I was a heavy user of libraries in Colombo in the 1960s and 1970s. I continue to be a heavy user of information. What happened in the past five decades is the internet. It should inform our thinking about library funding and donations to libraries.

Scarcity of attention

In 1971, several years before he received the Nobel Prize, Herbert Simon wrote:

"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundanc...