“We are overloaded with junk,” said Daniel Levitin, a professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University whose books include “The Organized Mind.” “It’s becoming harder and harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. The problem with the Internet is anyone can post, so it’s hard to know whether you are looking at a fact or pseudofact, science or pseudoscience.”

That problem seems quintessentially modern; Alvin Toffler didn’t popularize the term “information overload” until 1970. But in the relative realm of human experience, it is as constant and nettlesome as death and taxes. At least since the heyday of ancient Greece and Rome, each generation has confronted the overwhelming struggle to search, sift and sort growing piles of information to make what is known useful. “Papyrus, print or petabyte — the history of feeling overwhelmed by information always seems to go back further than the latest technology.” said Seth Rudy, a professor of English literature at Rhodes College who explores this phenomenon in his new book, “Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge.” “The sense that there is too much to know has been felt for hundreds, even thousands, of years.”

In response, figures of expert erudition and taste — such as the Roman Gaius Petronius Arbiter, whose impeccable taste made his name a byword of discernment, and the 19th-century critic Matthew Arnold, who defined culture as “the best that has been thought and known” — have helped distinguish the dross from the gold.

Primitive search engines developed in the Middle Ages are still with us, including indexes, concordances and tables of contents, while the dictionary and the florilegium (a compilation of quotations and excerpts from other writings) enabled busy people to sample the world’s wisdom. This remains a thriving business; a sales pitch of modern journalism is that reporters and critics do the work (read the book, see the play, try the recipe, interview experts) so you don’t have to.

Encyclopedias rose in the Enlightenment. Tellingly, Mr. Rudy said, most early works were created by one person and aimed to synthesize all knowledge into a single, coherent body. Soon, they became collections of discrete articles written by a team of experts. By the 20th century, the storehouse of useful knowledge had grown at such a thrillingly alarming rate that the possibility of mastering just one area of study, such as physics, literature or art — much less to become a Renaissance man who could make important contributions to various fields — became less aspiration than delusion.

Julianne Moore’s character captured this sense in the Oscar-winning movie “Still Alice” when she joked about “the great academic tradition of knowing more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing.”

That barb suggests a profound response to the explosion of information that has transformed modern scholarship and innovation: the rise of intense specialization and teamwork. “Once upon a time you could be a biologist,” said Benjamin F. Jones, an economist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “Now the accumulation of knowledge is such that biologists, for example, must specialize in an array of microdisciplines like evolutionary biology, genetics and cell functions.”