Research Information Management: Organising Humanities Material
How to Use This Course Book
This handbook accompanies the taught session for the course. Each section contains a brief overview of a topic for your reference and then one or more exercises.
The Exercises
Exercises are arranged as follows:
· A title and brief overview of the tasks to be carried out
· A numbered set of tasks, together with a brief description of each
· A numbered set of detailed steps that will achieve each task
Some exercises, particularly those within the same section, assume that you have completed earlier exercises. Your lecturer will direct you to the location of files that are needed for the exercises. If you have any problems with the text or the exercises, please ask the lecturer or one of the demonstrators for help.
This book includes plenty of exercise activities – possible more than can be completed during the hands-on sessions of the course. You should select some to try during the course, while the teacher and demonstrator(s) are around to guide you. Later, you may attend follow-up sessions at OUCS called Computer8, where you can continue work on the exercises, with some support from IT teachers. Other exercises are for you to try on your own, as a reminder or an extension of the work done during the course.
Writing Conventions
A number of conventions are used to help you to be clear about what you need to do in each step of a task.
· In general, the word press indicates you need to press a key on the keyboard. Click, choose or select refer to using the mouse and clicking on items on the screen (unless you have your own favourite way of operating screen features).
· Names of keys on the keyboard, for example the Enter (or Return) key, are shown like this Enter.
· Multiple key names linked by a + (for example, Ctrl+z) indicate that the first key should be held down while the remaining keys are pressed; all keys can then be released together.
· Words and commands typed in by the user are shown like this.
· Labels and titles on the screen are shown like this.
· Drop-down menu options are indicated by the name of the options separated by a vertical bar, for example File|Print. In this example you need to select the option Print from the File menu or tab. To do this, click when the mouse pointer is on the File menu or tab name; move the pointer to Print; when Print is highlighted, click the mouse button again.
· A button to be clicked will look like this.
· The names of software packages are identified like this, and the names of files to be used like this.
Software Used
Windows XP
Windows Explorer
Microsoft Word
Gmail
Files Used
Because of its focus on organising information, this course uses a large number of sample files: these can be found in the folders named Exercise 3 to Exercises 8-9, plus the Tool Guide folder.
Revision Information
Version / Date / Author / Changes made1.0 / January 2011 / Meriel Patrick / Created
2.0 / November 2011 / Meriel Patrick / Minor editing and updates
2.1 / April 2012 / Meriel Patrick / Rights statement updated
Copyright
The VIDaaS Project makes this document and the accompanying PowerPoint presentation and exercise files available for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.
Copyright for the screenshots in this document belongs to the respective software or content providers.
The Oxford University logo is copyright Oxford University, and may only be used by Oxford University members in accordance with the University's branding guidelines.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1. What You Should Already Know 1
1.2. What You Will Learn 1
1.3. Where Can I Get a Copy? 1
2 Key Principles of Information Management 2
2.1. The Basics 2
2.2. Honesty is the Best Policy 2
2.3. Skip the Guilt-Trip 2
2.4. It Pays to Plan Ahead 4
2.5. Be Realistic 4
2.6. Finding the Time 4
2.7. So What’s the Point of it All? 4
2.8. Retrieval Methods 4
Exercise 1 Small group discussion 1 4
3 Organising Paper Material 4
3.1. Identifying Your Working Style 4
3.2. Tips for Horizontal Organisers 4
3.3. Tips for Vertical Organisers 4
3.4. General Tips 4
Exercise 2 Self assessment questionnaire 4
4 Organising Electronic Material 4
4.1. Hierarchical Organisation 4
4.2. Tag-based Organisation 4
4.3. Managing a Hierarchical System in Windows 4
4.4. Tips for Making a Hierarchical System Work 4
4.5. Tools for Creating a Tag-Based System 4
4.6. Tips for Managing a Tag-Based File Storage System in Gmail 4
Exercise 3 Compare and contrast – hierarchical and tag-based organisation 4
Exercise 4 Small group discussion 2 4
Exercise 5 Creating a project folder using shortcuts 4
Exercise 6 Forcing a file order using file names 4
Exercise 7 Adding searchable keywords to a file 4
5 Linking Notes and Sources 4
5.1. Hyperlinks within Documents 4
5.2. Bibliographic Software 4
5.3. Other Software 4
5.4. Working with Images 4
5.5. DaaS and ORDS – Database as a Service and the Oxford Research Database Service 4
Exercise 8 Linking files using hyperlinks 4
Exercise 9 Linking to a specific place in a file using hyperlinks and bookmarks 4
Exercise 10 Useful tools 4
6 Other Resources 4
6.1. Further Research Information Management Courses 4
6.2. Software Courses 4
6.3. Computer8 4
6.4. OUCS Help Centre 4
6.5. Downloadable Course Materials 4
6.6. Useful Websites and Services 4
Appendix 1: Further Reading 4
OUCS iii April 2012
Research Information Management: Organising Humanities Material
1 Introduction
This booklet accompanies the course delivered by Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS), IT Learning Programme. Although the exercises are clearly explained so that you can work through them yourself, you will find that it will help if you also attend the taught session where you can get advice from the lecturer, demonstrators and even each other!
If at any time you are not clear about any aspect of the course, please make sure you ask your lecturer or demonstrator for help. If you are away from the class, you can get help by email from your lecturer or from
1.1. What You Should Already Know
This session is one of a series covering aspects of managing the types of material used in humanities research projects.
We will assume that you are familiar with simple file management tasks – opening and closing files, creating new files and folders, and moving files around.
The computer network in OUCS may differ slightly from that which you are used to in your College or Department; if you are confused by the differences, ask for help from the lecturer or demonstrators.
1.2. What You Will Learn
This course introduces some techniques for managing research material, with a view to helping you identify those that will work best for you and your research project. You will also have the opportunity to try out some of these techniques yourself.
In this session we will cover the following topics:
· Identifying your working style
· Organising electronic material
· Organising paper material
· File and folder structures
· Tagging vs. hierarchical filing
· Retrieving information
· Linking notes and sources
· Linking text and images
The course will include a brief introduction to some software and online tools which may be of use. Some of these tools will be covered in more detail in a later course – details are given in Section 4.
1.3. Where Can I Get a Copy?
The software mentioned in this course includes a mixture of freely available and commercial packages. For most programs, a URL including further information about the software (including how to acquire it) is provided.
2 Key Principles of Information Management
2.1. The Basics
The first thing to note is that there’s no single right (or wrong) way to organise your research material. What matters is finding a system that works for you.
This means that when you start thinking about how to organise your information, you need to consider two things – what’s important to you, and what you’re planning to do with the information, so you can design your system to meet your needs. (It also means, incidentally, that if anything in this course doesn’t work for you, you should feel free to ignore it.)
A second key principle is that being organised is a means to an end, not an end in itself. If your system is doing what you need it to do, then it’s a good system – it doesn’t matter if it looks a little rough around the edges, or if it’s unconventional, or even if it looks disorganised to an outside observer. (Though if you’re working as part of a team, you may need to take into account your colleagues’ needs and preferences!)
Good information management involves steering a path between two equal and opposite pitfalls. One is doing too little, which tends to result in a gradual – or not so gradual – slide into chaos. The other is becoming so obsessed with perfect organisation that maintaining your filing system starts to take over from research. Key questions to ask yourself are:
· Is there a good chance this will save me time and effort?
· Is this going to make life easier in the long run?
2.2. Honesty is the Best Policy
However, there is a need for honest self-evaluation. We’ve probably all encountered people whose offices are in perpetual chaos, but who claim that they know where everything is – perhaps some of us have even been one of those people. If the claim is really true, then however messy it looks, the system is working – assuming, that is, that the person isn’t part of a team of collaborators who are struggling to use the same material. But in practice, if we’re brutally honest with ourselves, we know that the cry ‘I know where everything is!’ often actually means ‘I can find the things I’m working with right now, and anything else will probably turn up if I root around for long enough’ – which may be enough to muddle through on a day-to-day basis, but probably isn’t an efficient approach for the longer term.
2.3. Skip the Guilt-Trip
On the other hand, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be made to feel guilty because our way of doing things doesn’t match up to some perceived gold standard. It’s very easy to start feeling that we’re doing something wrong if we’re failing to achieve some of the supposed ideals of information management – a clear desk and an empty email inbox, for example. However, while these are great aids to productivity for some people (and if you are one of those people, go for it!), they don’t work for everyone. For a lot of people, the benefits brought by (for example) filing every last email simply aren’t worth the time and effort it takes, and if that’s the case, we should give ourselves permission just to do what we actually find helpful, rather than trying to live up to an ideal which doesn’t – for us, at least – serve any very useful purpose.
A particular issue is old files and folders – the material we accumulated during past research projects, or perhaps when we were undergraduates, and which is organised in a way that might have made sense for those past projects, but doesn’t really fit in with what we’re doing now. We can sometimes feel as though there’s a dinosaur lurking in the cupboard – it’s old, it’s bulky, and while we know what’s there is in theory interesting, it would take something akin to a full scale-archaeological excavation to deal with it properly. So it often just sits there, making us feel vaguely guilty.
Figure 1 Is there a dinosaur in your cupboard?
There are some situations where there’s a strong case to be made for doing something about it. If a significant proportion of the material is being reused on a regular basis, and it’s proving a hassle to have to keep digging things out of the old system, it may be worth taking some time to reorganise it and integrate it with your more recent material.
Another possible approach is ‘organic reorganisation’ – set up the organisational system that makes sense for the work you’re doing at the moment, and whenever you use an item from the old system, put it away in the new one. During the transitional period, when things are gradually being refiled, you may sometimes find you’re having to look in two places rather than one, but this method doesn’t require you to set aside a large chunk of time, and you won’t waste time refiling material that turns out not to be of any further use to you. But whether you prefer to get the reorganisation out of the way all at once or let it happen gradually is very much a matter of personal preference.
However, if you don’t need to refer to your older material very often, the best strategy may in fact be to let sleeping dinosaurs lie – leave it exactly as it is. For rarely used material, the benefits of reorganising everything properly are minimal, and are often simply not worth the time and effort it would take. If you only need to find something from a particular set of files once or twice a year, then even if it takes you an hour or so’s hunting to track it down, this is almost certainly still more efficient than the large investment of time it would take to deal with the whole collection. And unless you need the space it takes up for something else, even the time it would take to go through and decide if it’s worth keeping at all is probably time that could be better spent on other things. If it’s not in the way, you can legitimately decide to do nothing – and not to feel guilty about it.
2.4. It Pays to Plan Ahead
While it’s a good general principle that you should be only as organised as you need to be, this doesn’t mean just doing the bare minimum that’s necessary for the task currently in hand. When gathering or organising information, it’s important to think about what you’re going to do with it – and even to have half an eye on what you might want to do with it at some point in the more distant future (are you collecting data that could be reused in another project, for example – either by you or, if you choose to share your data, by another researcher?).