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Using Zotero as Digital Asset Management Software
I've been through the process of trying to find a good filing structure and naming convention for over 40 years. I can't say that I've found one, but I think that I'm getting very close. When I stumbled upon Zotero, I started to see the possibility of storing my genealogical information in a more traditional archival structure of, "Repository > Collection > Series [> Sub-series] > Folder > Item," and using Zotero to relate my archival structure to one which I could more easily use for my genealogy. Of course; Zotero will also handle a lot of the side-issues that I deal with every day; keyword searches, transcription notes and "To Do" Lists.
I use the original filename of the repository whenever possible since it is usually short and often contains embedded information that can be useful. If you can't use that filename, then an acquisition year and a sequential number will do. Filing this way tends to keep the length of pathnames+filenames to a minimum, which helps if your genealogical database software is limited to a total length of 256 Characters.
To give you just a glimpse of how I'm setting this up, I've attached a few images...
- "Archival File Structure" on my hard drive.
- "Logical File Structure" in Zotero and tagging.
- "Bibliography-Citation" notes in Zotero.
- "Extraction" notes in Zotero.
- "Local Storage Notes" in Zotero.
You can still use the "Info" section to create a citation and bibliographic entry, but they will never be quite as faithful to an Evidence Explained style as doing them oneself. So; I've chosen to do my own and store them as notes. I'll know better how this works, once I have run through the workflow a bit more.
Anyways... I'm not there yet, but this seems to have a lot of promise!
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Impressive system, Gary. I'll be eager to see how it develops!
Gary,
This is great. I will be downloading it and studying it. Thank you for sharing!
Ann
Thank you, both, for your encouragement.
I just chose one record as a proof-of-concept. It seemed to go more quickly and was less confusing than doing a similar thing in a spreadsheet. I'm anxious to see what it looks like when I get the full set of family records entered!
If you really want to see something amazing, you really need to see the research report output (attached). Now, this IS useful!
I'm also looking at the possibility of utilizing the "related records" to associate records relating to the same family, from the time of the parents' marriage to the time a member passes on or gets married. That would help me quite a bit during data entry into my genealogy database because it would pull together all the entries for a given family and allow me to focus on entering that group. It would also be easy to see which key records I'm missing. That said; I'm still not totally at ease with "related records" and will experiment with it once I get more records for this family entered into Zotero.
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I now have a number of records entered and the concept seems to work well. It's nice to push a button and get a Research Report for a person or even an entire family. Doing transcriptions is a breeze because one can click to open an image and then transcribe right into the Research Notes.
I have included a family-level Research Report so that you can see how it appears.
One thing I've noted is that the subsections don't print in the order in which they appear in Zotero. However; I understand there is a way to fix that.
Another is that the report is better-looking in HTML than in PDF. PDF seems to break the text at a point, based upon the structure of the HTML. I'm not sure what to do about that, yet. I'm looking into it.
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I've discovered one thing that Zotero DOES NOT LIKE. Don't use the "&" character in the "Title" field. It will cause issues with printing out a full bibliography. Can't say why but I suspect it is misinterpreted when formatting a report of bibliographic items.
WELL... Zotero has one significant issue. You are allowed to enter the Short Title, but it can't be shown in the main screen listing. I hoped to use it for my file's accession number. Now that's a wash.
This is great and Thanks for sharing it. I would like to suggest here to the readers a digital asset management software called Aproove. This has multiple features and easy integration process.
Thanks, @hevin. I'm not familiar with Aproove, but took a quick glance, and it looks like it is strong for collaboration.
And to @gary-gauthier, @hevin's post made me aware of at least three posts from you that I was never alerted to by email. I'm not sure what happened there, and I apologize for what must have seemed disinterest. I will check out the things you mentioned as issues. Thanks! --Donna Baker
Quote from History_Hunter on October 28, 2020, 10:57 pmI've discovered one thing that Zotero DOES NOT LIKE. Don't use the "&" character in the "Title" field. It will cause issues with printing out a full bibliography. Can't say why but I suspect it is misinterpreted when formatting a report of bibliographic items.
Hi, Gary. I'm not having issues with the ampersand, but I might not be going through the same steps you are. Or it could be that you're on a Mac (aren't you?). Can you let me know what procedure you used to do the bibliography? Thanks!
