Alan McFarlane's website

Prof. Hugh Miall of the University of Kent recommended  Alan Mc Farlane's website as an excellent source for interviews with and lectures by famous scholars and academics, including Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner and George Steiner. Although some of the lectures come across as unengaging and dreary and the way the interviews have been set up means that you can't hear the interviewer's questions clearly, it an extremely valuable and fascinating resource and I recommend it highly.

McFarlane has put a topics database up on the site in which he gives a fascinating explanation of how to abstract information efficiently using a paper slip system, which he subsequently turned into an electonic database. He also shows how people like Charles Darwin, Claude Levi-Strauss and Sir James Frazer made notes, indexed and abstracted information. I started doing my own version of this in which I abstracted information from books I was reading on a word document. However, the abstracts turned out much longer and weightier than McFarlane's suggested method, so I'm going to have to revisit the method to refine what I'm doing.