Curating the Content of the Books You Read

Greetings, Readers!

Welcome back to another edition of "Musings of a Book Queen," where we look at the world of lifelong learning. Today, let's explore a concept of content curation with a twist.

Introduction

I often say to clients that reading a book and not applying the ideas is like spending all day in the kitchen preparing a five-course meal and not eating it. And I often recommend that they take notes as they read books. What do you do with your notes? How do you manage your notes so you can use them to transform your business and career?

Before you read a book, have a purpose for doing so. And for nonfiction books, list the questions you want the book to answer.

So you have a bunch of book notes. It’s important to make sense of the information, so you can use it. One way to do that is to curate your notes. In the book Curate This by Steven Rosenbaum, the author presents the 5 models of content curation.

5 Models of Content Curation

1. Aggregation: Act of creating the most relevant information about a particular topic into a single location.
2. Distillation: Act of curating information into a simpler format. Only the most relevant information is shareable.
3. Elevation: Curation to identify a longer trend or insight from smaller daily musings posted online.
4. Mashups: Taking multiple points of view on an issue, then sharing it in one place. New point of view created by merging existing content.
5. Chronology: Curation that brings together historical information organized based on time to show an evolving understanding of a topic.

Have you used any of the five models of content curation?

I’ve used aggregation, elevation, and mashups. In past editions of Musings of a Book Queen, I’ve mentioned that if you want to have a strong foundation on any topic, you need to read five of the best books on the subject. That’s an example of aggregation. I remember doing this for some books on virality.

I worked on a project for a professor, who is a futurist and I read and summarized books on futurism. That’s an example of distillation when you look at all the information from the books. A few weeks ago, I wrote about syntopic reading, and that would be an example of mashups. You’d be reading books on a topic in relation to each other.

Go through your book notes from the last five nonfiction books you’ve read. Apply one of the five content curation models to see what you discover.

What do you think? How can you use content curation to make sense of your book notes?

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Warm regards,

Avil Beckford

Editor, Musings of a Book Queen