In his recently translated How to Write a Thesis, Umberto Eco – who passed away this past February – wrote this about personalising books. I've always been a serial underliner – but I've yet to follow his advice on colours. This book is an invaluable resource and I highly recommend it. Even though some say it is dated as Eco discusses his method of using index cards for references, the task is to incorporate these methods into the ways we deal with citations in 2016. While I use a number of software for saving my arguments, quotations, and notes on things I've read (Evernote, PapersApp and formerly Zotero and Mendeley), sometimes the infinite amount of tools at my disposal means that I've lost a lot of information because I can no longer find it. Perhaps a box with index cards sorted alphabetically isn't a bad idea...but I'm still trying to incorporate this digitally.
