Using notes in zotero for Historical research

emchateau

Hi, (sorry for my english, i'm French)

As an historian, I've been searching a long time for a note-taking application for archives sources. I found Scribe witch seems to beat all the things I was looking for. But this program seems not to be developped anymore and Elena Razlogova who wrote it suggest to pass to Zotero.

So it seems that Zotero could become a sort of universal tool for managing sources and note taking. As I really enjoy Zotero for source management, it could be a really wonderfull solution. BUT there is many capabilities witch are not adapted for historical purpose in Zotero.

The first thing is about the fact the notes are not numeroted. Of course we can put a number in the title but it will be nice if we could create different notes from a single source and they get automaticly an order number in a special customizable field (to change it for example).
Then we could conserve the order of the archives because this order is an information in itself.

Secondly, in Scribe it possible to view just notes without parent grouping. It would be very usefull if we could sort the notes as we can sort the sources independently of the source related to. In zotero we can only do this with the report. It seems there is a ticket for allowing for viewing of notes independently from sources (https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/672) it would be very usefull.

But maybe it will not be necessary if notes were managed like others elements we would hierachicly related to others elements.

Thanks a lot if you could improve Zotero for historical research prupose as Scribe sould not be developped anymore.

erazlogo

The first thing is about the fact the notes are not numeroted. Of course we can put a number in the title but it will be nice if we could create different notes from a single source and they get automaticly an order number in a special customizable field (to change it for example).

See discussion here on ordering collections: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2909/ Perhaps something like that could be devised for notes. For now, there are no plans to add page no/order no field to notes, although some people have asked for this.

Then we could conserve the order of the archives because this order is an information in itself.

If you record sources in the order they are stored in the archive, sorting them by "date added" will give you the archival order. You can also switch your notes to sort chronologically by turning on extensions.zotero.sortNotesChronologically (a hidden preference: type about:config in the location bar to bring up this option). But then archival boxes store documents, not the notes from them, so you'd need to sort the parent items in archival order, right?

It seems there is a ticket for allowing for viewing of notes independently from sources (https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/672) it would be very usefull.

This is not easy to do but many people have asked for this--I'm pretty sure more features will be added to Zotero eventually to make this possible. See also this discussion and related tickets:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2752/parent-and-child-search-option/#Item_13
https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/1005
https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/1006