SESSION 5 · ~60M
Loading sources & building a notebook
A notebook is only as good as the sources you load — curate them like a librarian, not a hoarder.
NotebookLM is a retrieval engine: you load your own sources, and answers are grounded in them and cited. The quality of everything downstream — answers, summaries, audio — is determined by the quality and curation of what you load.
What you can load
- PDFs — papers, reports, manuals, your own exported documents.
- URLs — web articles and public pages (note: paywalled or blocked sites won't work).
- Notes — pasted text, Google Docs, or your own write-ups.
- Audio/video — some notebooks accept transcripts of recordings.
Curate like a librarian, not a hoarder. Dumping 200 sources 'just in case' dilutes relevance and confuses retrieval. A tight, on-topic set of 5–20 high-quality sources beats a sprawling dump every time. Add sources as you find gaps; don't front-load everything.
One notebook per domain. A notebook for 'IBP demand planning', another for a specific product launch, another for one research question. Mixing unrelated sources in a single notebook produces answers that are grounded but incoherent. Scope each notebook to one question or domain.
Source quality is contagious. If your sources are authoritative, current, and on-topic, the answers will be too. If they're outdated or contradictory, the notebook will faithfully reproduce those flaws — it grounds in what you give it.
TRY IT
Pick one domain you work in. Gather 5–8 of your best sources on it (a paper, a couple of internal docs, a relevant URL) and create a notebook for just that topic. Resist the urge to add more — curation is the practice.
CHECK YOUR UNDERSTANDING
How many sources does the module recommend loading into a NotebookLM notebook?
Why does the module recommend one notebook per domain or question?
What is the effect of source quality on NotebookLM answers?
NOTEBOOKLM
Connect your notebook
Paste a NotebookLM share link to embed your notebook for this module.