Scroll down to see the Zotero Forum.
People, Places, Topics and Tools... Which one to choose?
Donna;
In your book you give a brief explanation of your system. I am researching to determine when an where a photo of a Lancaster bomber and crew was taken (and hopefully determine the crew names).
Regarding the term “Topics”; do you also use that for times when you’re researching a “Thing,” such as this bomber, even though it is associated with the people, one person is in the photo and there will likely be references to the person in the course of your research?
I store the actual item in the place that ties it most importantly to my research. If the bomber is important to me because it was flown or maintained by my ancestor, I'd store it under my ancestor's record in PEOPLE. If my main goal is to write an article about bombers, I'd choose TOPICS and make a topic for "Bombers." If I'm most interested in Lancaster, I'd store it in PLACES, with a subcollection for Lancaster.
The great thing about Zotero is that you can put pointers that, in essence, allow you to find the item later in any number of places. So you could have links in all of these areas. The only decision you have to make (if you want to be efficient about disk space) is where you'll store the image itself. I don't worry about whether, in the end, I might do research on all of the different things above--the ancestor, the plane, and the town. No matter where I store the reference to the image in Zotero, it will take me to the place where I stored the image.
Some people don't use categories at all. Everything just sits in the Zotero main library. They use the search engine to find things. I prefer more structure, but either way can work.
Does this make sense?
Thank you. I’ll have to read up on links a bit.
My apologies to anyone subscribed to this topic who got spammed in the night with 35 posts by "Easton"--all now deleted. While my antispam software very effectively prevents hundreds, if not thousands, of such posts a day, once in a while, a spammer gets through and posts until I ban them and put them on the international blacklist. Thank you all for your patience.
