Using Zotero as a research diary

jimdelaney
I was wondering if anybody has tried to use Zotero as a field journal? I am thinking about transcribing field notes on a daily or weekly basis to Zotero notes, which gives them to ability to be searchable and linked to other resources such as documents and newspaper articles. It is not optimum, but does serve to keep all of my notes in one place.

Has there been any discussion or thought about creating a field research journal entry as an item type (including place, date, etc.)?

Thanks,

Jim Delaney
  • bdarcus
    I don't recall discussion of this, but it's a great idea. I would say, however, that there's been a lot of discussion about enhancing notes, and that's probably the better place to do this (rather than an entry type).
  • scot
    2nd. It is a great idea. And I also second the idea of approaching it as a note enhancement. Somehow if individual notes could (also) be treated as more independent entities, so that those which are not 'reading notes' (and therefore children of database items) could be handled similarly to those that are. For example if you could get --and maybe you can now, haven't tried-- all of your notes (independent or child) in one place for review and processing. Then if you had some elementary workflow capability (possible now with tags and collections, but unwieldy), then you might finally feel like your index-card using office mate had nothing on you.

    I too like keeping all my notes in one place, and like being able to link them both to database items and other media (PDFs, images, URLs), but I don't yet have the feeling like I can see all my notes, and *work* them (ordering, rewriting, expanding, sorting, tagging for further research, etc). (And tell me, does Apple really have a defensible patent on multi-touch interfaces, 'cause in a few years *that* could really do wonders for this whole matter.)
  • jimdelaney
    I agree that better note handling could take care of most of what I need. But given that this would likely mean adding metadata to notes, I am wondering if an item type would fit better into Zotero's workflow. And, yes, better note management and organization is a must; though I do not expect to work with the notes in Zotero, but rather to store them and sort them, and then move them to an outliner to do my *work*.

    I am actually trying this as a replacement for my Tinderbox workflow, from which Zotero could learn a lot about note management.
  • mark
    edited December 2, 2008
    This is related to earlier threads about enhancing the note-taking capability, e.g. year/date/creator for standalone notes.

    Without even such simple enhancements, standalone notes (which are quite nice) are easily lost in the library.

    But the other important issue is about the way of linking to other items. Currently there only is the possibility of using 'related items'. I would love to have hyperlinks to Zotero entries, not only in fulltext notes, but also for use by external applications. (See this thread.)
  • jimdelaney
    The more that I think about it, I think that having a research journal entry item type may be the most effective short-term way to accomplish this. This would allow both the addition of necessary metadata (date and place) and would also, following Zotero's approach, allow for attaching multiple notes to one entry. For now, I may be able to accomplish the same with another item type.

    Jim Delaney
  • bibliografree
    Another clumsy contribution towards my aim of Zotero being easy to use for collaborative discussion using quotes (attached to a reference).

    For my interest of facilitating discussion using quotes, I wonder if a basic outlining feature could be implemented in Zotero 1.5 by allowing users to switch between views with notes foregrounded or as now references foregrounded.

    See http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/178/related-tab/#Item_4 for a possible way to have a directional Relation between a note and another reference (and hence another attached note or notes) in recent versions of Zotero.
  • jamesturner125
    edited April 29, 2010
    Recently my manager asked me to work on a solution like the one described by the first poster. The guy who owns and run the company where I work has a great wealth of knowledge and is keen on sharing it, but we he needs to be able to do this without taking too much of his time. This is where a streamlined system comes in place. I am giving some serious thought to zotero to be part of this solution as part of a bigger organization knowledge management strategy.           best price moving
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