In his book De Arte Excerpendi: Imparare a dimenticare nella modernità (Leo S. Olschki Editore, Firenze 2006), Alberto Cevolini offers an innovative contribution, from the perspective of the social systems theory, to the sociology of culture by investigating the transformations related to the processes in the storage of social knowledge. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the connection between changes of the social structure in the transition from premodern to modern society, on the one hand, and the modalities of acquisition, memorization and filing of knowledge, on the other. The main thesis of the volume is that the specificity of the modern social memory consists of adopting new techniques, such as modern archives, which, while making unnecessary the use of individual memory, entail a high degree of variety, innovation and contingency of social knowledge.