Research: How Do You Take Notes? How Do You Organize Them?

Charles D'Aniello Discussion

This is a suggestion that we share with one another how we each perform these critical actions. I think the topic might be interesting to many of us.   Some may use Zotero http://www.zotero.org/support/notes or some, EndNote http://endnote.com/blog/note-taking-tips-memory-and-organization ?  Such tools can be used for more than pulling references off the Web.  Perhaps you use something else?  What advice can you offer on using such tools?  On the general topic, I recently discovered this http://www.williamcronon.net/researching/notetaking.htm .  A quick Google search turned this up from 2009: http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2009/from-notes-to-narrative-the-art-of-crafting-a-dissertation-or-monograph/on-taking-notes .  Are there other things that might be read in this regard?    Are these topics that librarians should explore with students in their instructional efforts?  To what extent?  Who taught you how to do these things?  Based on your personal experience, what advice can you pass on?  I’m sure your response to one, more, or all of these questions (as well as to pertinent topics that come to mind) would be useful to some folks. 

 

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When I was in grad school in the early 80s (1980s, that is wink), only one of my instructors -- David Lovejoy, a scholar of colonial America -- actually brought his research notes to class to show us how he organized his sources (4x6 cards).  When "microcomputers" appeared on the market, I still gathered materials on note cards and typed into a word processor.  While working as an editorial assistant at the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, I was introduced to XyWrite, which the project had customized for notes and camera-ready copy.  University of North Carolina Press used it as a house processing program when I submitted my manuscript to them.  XyWrite became the programming basis for Nota Bene, which I've used for the past 10 years or so.  NB recently released an entirely revised version reworked from the bottom up.  It combines a reference manager / database, search function, and word processor.  You can find these tools separately on the web, and you can use plugins and add-ons to MS Word to achieve similar results, but so far I haven't seen a program that integrates them into one package designed specifically for professional writers and humanists so effectively and efficiently. There's no bloat in it. It is both menu and keyboard driven and all of its codes and formatting can be edited -- no Visual Basic to learn -- so that it can be customized to create powerful shortcuts for routine writing chores.  You file your research notes as word-processed files, which you can customize so that when you insert them into your manuscript they confirm to the manuscript's chosen publishing style.  NB has a fanatical following of historians, librarians, scholars of ancient religions (it handles arcane language formats with ease), and literateurs who serve as its help community (H-Net runs a private list with open subscriptions for them).

cheers

Peter Knupfer, Michigan State University