An instance may be given of the necessity of the “ separate sheet ” system.Among the many sources of information from which we constructed our bookThe Manor and the Borough were the hundreds of reports on particular boroughsmade by the Municipal Corporation Commissioners in 1835 .These four hugevolumes are well arranged and very fully indexed; they were in our own possession;we had read them through more than once; and we had repeatedly consulted themon particular points. We had, in fact, used them as if they had been our own boundnotebooks, thinking that this would suffice. But, in the end, we found ourselvesquite unable to digest and utilise this material until we had written out every oneof the innumerable facts on a separate sheet of paper, so as to allow of the mechanicalabsorption of these sheets among our other notes; of their complete assortment bysubjects; and of their being shuffled and reshuffled to test hypotheses as to suggestedco-existences and sequences.

The problem found in the literature is that students are not efficient note takers, meaning they only successfully capture information about 20% of the time, and they are organizationally flawed and therefore miss how information should fit together. These shortcomings, efficiency and organization, are particularly acute in individuals taking notes on a computer alone (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014). Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) specifically find that computers –when used in isolation –lead to lower levels of information retention, and they postulate this is due to students trying to bestenographers with keyboards instead of actively engaging with the material.