Upgrade StorageBest way to manage Kindle highlights (or how to add tags inside a note and not per note)
Hi!
I use mostly Zotero as a way to manage highlights and notes of documents I read on my kindle (paperwhite). I have seen that for Amazon books we can copy/paste the highlights and notes from http://kindle.amazon.com in the notes tab of Zotero citations and the link to the loc is preserved.
But because I mostly use what amazon called "personal documents", my highlights and notes are not saved on my kindle account. The only way I can access them is with myclipping.txt.
So what I do is: copy all my highlights and notes from this myclipping.txt from a specific personal document and then paste them in a single note for the appropriate citation. And that's when the difficult thing starts!
The problem: I have on average 500 highlights and notes per citation and I am looking for an easy way of organizing them and retrieving them. So I would like to add tag for each highlight.
Solution 1: I can add tags to the whole notes but not in a specific part of a note (all my highlights are in one note). So each time I make a new highlight I have to click on "add a note" and to type the tags. That way my tags are associated to each specific highlights, but fisrt it takes a lot of time and second I don't have them listed in the tags windows at the left-bottom of Zotero. I have seen that I could use the search function to look for them, but it still not convenient.
Solution 2: to take full advantage of the Zotero tags function, I could copy paste each of my highlights in a separate notes, one by one. But for more than a thousands (and counting) of highlights, it's quite a big work!
So I am stuck between those to solutions, with no hope of finding an efficient way of organizing my highlights. Any idea about a better way to deal with that?
Thanks a lot for your help!
I use mostly Zotero as a way to manage highlights and notes of documents I read on my kindle (paperwhite). I have seen that for Amazon books we can copy/paste the highlights and notes from http://kindle.amazon.com in the notes tab of Zotero citations and the link to the loc is preserved.
But because I mostly use what amazon called "personal documents", my highlights and notes are not saved on my kindle account. The only way I can access them is with myclipping.txt.
So what I do is: copy all my highlights and notes from this myclipping.txt from a specific personal document and then paste them in a single note for the appropriate citation. And that's when the difficult thing starts!
The problem: I have on average 500 highlights and notes per citation and I am looking for an easy way of organizing them and retrieving them. So I would like to add tag for each highlight.
Solution 1: I can add tags to the whole notes but not in a specific part of a note (all my highlights are in one note). So each time I make a new highlight I have to click on "add a note" and to type the tags. That way my tags are associated to each specific highlights, but fisrt it takes a lot of time and second I don't have them listed in the tags windows at the left-bottom of Zotero. I have seen that I could use the search function to look for them, but it still not convenient.
Solution 2: to take full advantage of the Zotero tags function, I could copy paste each of my highlights in a separate notes, one by one. But for more than a thousands (and counting) of highlights, it's quite a big work!
So I am stuck between those to solutions, with no hope of finding an efficient way of organizing my highlights. Any idea about a better way to deal with that?
Thanks a lot for your help!
Another thing to consider is that, at some point, a large number of notes is going to slow down Zotero. That's not going to be a problem with 1000 notes, but if you have 500 notes _per citation_ and have even just 100 such annotated citations (i.e. 50,000 total notes), that's going to start having a very noticeable impact. Double or triple that and Zotero is likely going to become all but unusable.
1)Just to be sure: which set up will be faster ?
Set up A : 500 citations with 1 really heavy note each (the equivalent of 100 pages of Word per note)
Set up B: 500 citations with 500 "light" notes each + tags (with only a couple of sentences per note).
2) As it is easy to reach the current limit of 50k total items before Zotero slows down. Does Zotero plan any improvement for this issue (for example by using a more powerful Standalone desktop software and using only the Firefox plugin to implement it or something like that)?
Thanks a lot for your work!
Zotero is always working on performance improvements, though more incrementally than fundamentally (the issue is really about dealing with a giant sqlite database, which is and will remain the backbone of Zotero, it has relatively little to do with the Standalone or Firefox software, which are basically the same, anyway). I'd expect the next version of Zotero, in particular, to perform a good deal better, though, yes.
But I would question the statement that 50k total items are "easy to reach"--in fact, very few people do at this point.