Quote from Donna Cox Baker on February 19, 2019, 12:50 am

I know your pain, Donna W. If you see the discussion we're having on how to document slave bills of sale, you'll see another example of the paralysis that options can bring.

With Zotero, you can start to create the organization, then over time, pull in all your disparate documents. My path to order has been long and is not done.

 

Quote from staceycummings on March 20, 2019, 12:16 pm

I'm trying to work through my workflow for researching and replacing my cumbersome excel research log (as in many logs).  I'm running up against an issue with Zotero, so I wondered how you all are doing it. It has to do with the many to one source Donna talks about in her book.

Background: My reason for keeping a research log is so I have a record of what record I looked at, what I was looking for and when I looked for it. Those are the basic columns in my excel sheet. I have additional columns for documenting, yes or no did I find what I was looking for, a citation if I did find it, a comments column for things I found that I wasn't looking for, like another ancestors name.

Here's my example: I created a collection in Zotero for Sources. As I was analyzing a source (viewing 90 non-indexed images on a website) I found two references, one to my subject and one to his possible brother. I created a note for each separate person, a NIL note (for the other brother that is not in those images) and an Associates note (for his wife's family that I'm not focusing on right now, but I need to remember they are in that tax list).

Source Collection:

People Collection: What I would really like to do, is put the notes for the specific person in these folders. Nicholas and Ellis need different citations, like a census citation, one family is on image 3 and the next family is one image 40:

Here's Nicholas's folder: Because I have one source instead of four separate copies of the TaxList source (Nicholas, Ellis, Nil searches and associates). All of those notes go under Nicholas's folder.

Any ideas, I'm thinking I need to make two to four separate copies of that one source because the citation would be different. That seems like it could get in a mess.

Thanks,

Stacey

Quote from Ann C Gilchrest on March 20, 2019, 4:14 pm

Thinking out loud here. 

If you want to keep all the notes about a specific source together.  You could use a generic citation to the source. Then put the specifics for each citation in the extra field. Another option might be to put the specifics of each citation in each note with a note in the extra field telling you to add the specifics to the citation. 

Other option might be to 'add attachment' either linking to the image on your hard drive or linking to the website image. The link has a place to add your notes and you can change the title of the link.  

If you did it this way each person folder would contain all the notes on that source.

Another way to do this would be to create the separate entries/citations, in this case, it would be 4 specific entries. Once you have the 4 entries use the related tab to link them all together.  

I hope this makes sense.

Quote from Donna Cox Baker on March 20, 2019, 4:30 pm

While your cleanest approach is to create four different sources, I don't think I'd go that way myself, Stacey. If you do, and you later find an error in how you created the citation record, you have to change it in four places. Personally, I don't mind that the various names show up under the source because it, in essence, creates an index--telling you all the people of interest to you that appeared in that source. It's easy to scan for the one who is a match to Nicholas, and it becomes a tickler to your memory that you found the related people. If you were finding LOTS of people in the one source, I might recommend creating a note per surname, rather than a note per person. You could also create a note under the source that keeps up with the info you used to capture in the research log about what you've searched in the source.

 

Quote from staceycummings on March 20, 2019, 8:42 pm

Ann and Donna,

Thank you for your replies. I have some ideas to go with. I really want this to work for me because the excel thing is not working!

Since this is my research log and I don't plan on putting every source I ever find in Zotero, I might end up just getting rid of my people folders. What I really want to know is what have I looked at and who did I look for, which is answered by putting the notes on the source, and forget the people folder for now.

I'm so glad I have someone to bounce ideas off of. I thought Zotero was a great product for genealogy when I stumbled on it.

Thanks,

Stacey

Quote from Ann C Gilchrest on March 21, 2019, 2:27 am

The bouncing off of ideas has helped me tremendously. I am still working out how I want my workflow to go. Donna, I love the idea of a pseudo-index for a source that idea is going to come in handy.

Quote from Donna Cox Baker on March 21, 2019, 2:29 am

I like having the sounding board, too, Stacey. And I like finding others that recognized the value of Zotero. I hope the plan above works for you.

Quote from staceycummings on March 25, 2019, 1:06 am

I've been thinking about this and got a chance to work on it this weekend. I decided you were right, how many instances would I have a source that had a zillion people in it. I'm creating my source and adding a note for each person that is in the source. I'm putting my citation info in the note for that person. The source has everything else. Now granted if I was publishing that might be a pain, but if that ever happens, I can kick myself then 🙂 Then I'm making heavy use of tags. I came up with four to use consistently. I add a tag for the persons ID number that is in FMT software, a tag for my research project ID, a tag (PIDuk for everybody) if there's a person I don't have in FMT (someone I just discovered with the same last name for instance) and a tag for known associates I've seen on other sources and recognized the name. Now I can search by tags, to get the information I want. I'm also adding that Person ID to the note. If I want to search on that ID in the notes field, Zotero bolds the note that has the data, so makes it easy to see which note is the one I'm looking for:

If I search on my tag for associates, I can look at the notes and see if names are occurring again and again across sources. Same thing with my unknown people who are probably family members.

Thanks so much to both of you for your input!

Stacey

 

 

 

 

 

Quote from Donna Cox Baker on March 26, 2019, 12:28 am

Sounds like a great plan, Stacey!