- Years of reading, poking around, and collecting useful references.
I have several relatives that tend to "collect" stuff (we have a long-standing joke in the family about "the shed" that refers to a
very large structure up in Illinois), and I sometimes suspect that whatever "collecting gene" is responsible for that is also behind my tendency to collect information (books, CD's, web site links, PDF manuals, ...). Fortunately my collecting tendencies aren't particularly space-consuming (although I never seem to have enough bookshelves).