Upgrade StorageNotetaking capabilities and request for recommendations
I am going to use Zotero as my bibliography software, but I'm unsure about using it for notes. Currently I use Filemaker Pro with a template I created myself and its functionality is great because I can do so much with it and search many fields. I am historian and for my most recent project I had over 3,000 notes in Filemaker Pro and it seems to me like Zotero would have a hard time managing it. Most of my notes come from books rather than articles, so having the web integration would not be a major advantage for me. However, tighter integration with the bibliography application would be convenient, though not necessary.
I am wondering if there are others who take extensive notes who have tried using Zotero for all their notes? What are people's notetaking preferences now? Do a lot of people still use Filemaker Pro or Zotero, or are there better options out there now?
Thank you very much,
Jeff
I am wondering if there are others who take extensive notes who have tried using Zotero for all their notes? What are people's notetaking preferences now? Do a lot of people still use Filemaker Pro or Zotero, or are there better options out there now?
Thank you very much,
Jeff
I'd say the only thing currently lacking is the ability to cleanly distinguish commentary from excerpts, but IIRC that's likely to be addressed in the future.
The main problem for me is lack of any internal structure, one manifestation of which is the commentary/excerpts issue Bruce mentioned. Lack of ability to link to other notes is also a pain (I know there's 'related', but it's not the same). I believe there are plans to make rich text available in notes, which would be a step forward, but not the best one for my purposes. I would have preferred an outlining facility, emphasising structure over formatting.
Comparing to my main note-taking system (a wiki), for the present I'd say Zotero is better for direct notes on books and articles, but not as good for thematic or topic-based notes.
Outlining capability would be nice (not within a note but an outline structure that would organize notes) but I think that can be done better as a "utility" rather than in the main Zotero structure.
Oh, yes, and I've been using Zotero for notetaking and it works pretty well for me, particularly since notes now belong in collections and saved searches and are always displayed in context of their parent items (books, etc.).
Re outlining, I actually meant within a note. I'm not following developments in detail, so I may have this wrong, but I understand that rich text is being considered for note contents, but I think outlining would be more relevant. Structure seems to matter for notes more than formatting, which only really has much of a purpose for finished work. Obviously structure has to be visually represented by some formatting or other, but outlining makes clear the primacy of the former.
1. ...
[tab] i. ...
[tab][tab] a. ...
my understanding is that people want rich-text notes to preserve the formatting of the source--italics in a quotation from a book, for example.
I did try adding notes via external Word/OO documents for a while, but that's more cumbersome, and you lose text search ability.
All in all, the upsides of using Zotero for note-taking do definitely outweigh the downs. It's what I'm using. Fair enough, I can see that. Though I guess rich text would also be attempting to copy the source font style, which would be a bit weird.
For example, let's say we allow different types of notes. Let's say I want to type in an excerpt from some book. I type that in a note typed "excerpt". I then want another note to include my commentary on the first one.
Simply saying the two are "related" isn't adequate. I need to be able to say the second "comments on" the first.
There are different ways to go with the notes functionality. One could keep the simple structure of notes and think of a bunch of semantically linked individual notes.
Or you could add wiki-like markup (and maybe some WYSIWYG alternative) that could include headings and lists and such; where the structure is more internal to the notes.
Or, of course, you could do both to give users flexibilty.
I'm wondering now if the first is easier to handle from a data and programming perspective.
The difficulties arose from two sources. Firstly, a wiki effectively has no UI, relying on a lot of markup, templates etc, which all have to be remembered. Secondly, with just the facilities for semantic markup, but no pre-existing types, it relies on the user to set it all up. That requires more forethought than most people (including me) are likely to want to spend, when all they want to do is get on with their own work.
Notes need to be simpler than that! Anything structural has to be represented mnemonically in the UI. And relation (or any other entity) types have to be set up logically in advance, which produces problems of lack of flexibility, etc.
Too hard a problem for me. I suspect more than a minimal amount of structure within and between notes might be more trouble than it's worth.
I would like to output the notes from multiple citations or standalone places into a single document to use as a beginning basis for further writing. Unless I am missing something, the only way I have seen is create a large report with the bulky citation details for each citation having to be deleted out by hand.
To begin brainsorming this Dan S. asked me to post an HTML mockup for possible formatting of notes reports. Here it is:
Right now if I need to print two selected child notes in a report I need to export all parent items with all of their notes. Ideally, I should be able to export the two notes with brief info on their parents, with tags attached to selected notes, not to parent items as in the current version. Something like this formatting should allow one to export saved searches more precisely and should help to use printed notes as a basis for writing, as jays suggests above:
I was asking for this: But if this could be done with the Word plugin that would be even better. Dan S. has suggested this: I'm not sure but I think Dan S. meant that Zotero could somehow extract page number from the beginning of the note (if it's enclosed in brackets or tags I guess) and put it into the citation. That would be really nice.
The one problem I see with this option, however, is that users will then need to learn a specific tagging system for page numbers for automatic citation to work (the same applies to the future online exchange of material--any notes markup would need to be standardized for people to know in advance that a number in brackets in the beginning of someone else's note is a page number).
And: there should not only be a dedicated "pages" field in the note card, but the possibility of user created headers as well (for those of us who want to use different types of tags in hierarchy: dates, categories, keywords).
I love zotero, but to become it a true research tool for humanities, zotero absolutely needs:
a) The possibility to arrange single child-notes of several books/articles/etc. independently in collection-folders without removing them from their parent book/article/etc.
b) The possibility to generate reports from those collections, such that the content of the single notes is shown together with a reference to their respective parent. (This reference could be citation style, eg. author & title.) This is for producing outlines.
c) The possibility to generate a bibliography of the parents of the notes.
I will give a working example for what this is needed:
Short Example:
1) I have 3 books in my library and each book has 20-something childnotes containing excerpts.
2) I create collection called "my new book" and two subcolletions called "chapter1" and "chapter2".
3) I look through my excerpts and drag'n drop some of them into "chapter1" and some of them into "chapter2".
4) I generate a report on "chapter1" and start writing on chapter1 of the new book.
Tagging just doesn't have the same functionality.
The same goes for any inability to move child notes around freely from parents. I didn't have to have them stuck together when I did the old paper note cards -- why do I have to do that now? It's as of, I would have to pick up the book and plop it down every time I wanted to use the note. That's ridiculous. That's why I used a note card that has a place for a brief title/author, page, and tag. Then I could move one piece of paper around an outline freely, not a stack of books or a whole pile of note cards for one book. I could also number it to fit an outline structure.
I'm distressed that there still appears to be problems with the ability to use quotes, italics, etc. I need those.
Finally, there is a huge difference between a note taken as a quotation and one that is my commentary. If those are still not two distinct options, then, again, I might as well go back to the paper cards. Especially, if I can't use quotation marks, etc.
I'm also surprised to see that you still can't create a hyper link in a quotation note or longer note to a commentary note. What if I want to comment just on a section of a quote or a long note? The hyper link should exist where I can click and, boom, having created the link, I'm taken to a child note that relates to just that section. I can do this in other programs...(highlight the phrase, create hyperlink). I could also do this with paper cards -- create a code, use a different color card or some distinguishing characteristic -- and attach the secondary card to the primary.
I'm being pushed to move to Zotero, but I don't think it looks ready yet. I've been told major effort is going to be put into developing the note taking aspects. Is this true? Are we going to see these problems seriously taken up?
On what basis can you really make this argument; that you find Zotero essentially useless unless you have this one feature? If you've read through previous discussion, you'll know that the Zotero developers are aware of all this, but that a) they have a lot of stuff on their plates, and b) the solution isn't as obvious as you seem to think.
It's not clear to me, for example, that having an explicit "extract" note type is necessarily better than other possible ways to achieve the same thing (like, say, allowing note content to be explicitly tagged as a quote, and location attached to it). I suspect different types of users would have different opinions on this.
Also, why do you say you can't use quotation marks. I do this all the time now. If you want to do this sort of annotation, then you should use the annotation functionality. That's what it's for. It sounds to me you need to have a little more open mind. Just because you've done things a certain way in another application doesn't mean that you should be able to do the exact same thing the exact same way in Zotero. I'm sure that notes will see improvements that will address some of your concerns, but in the meantime I suggest you a) learn to use Zotero's annotation functionality for HTML documents, and b) be creative with the notes feature; you can use quotation marks to indicate quotes, and you can also use something like this to keep track of them for now:
I disagree with the "silly comment"@53 that Doe makes about X.