March 5, 2007: Organizing Research

Luther’s papers archived at the Schomburg Center are organized in four categories:

1. Personal Papers filling 8 archival storage boxes with file labels such as Ephemera, Household, Family Correspondence, Appointment Books, etc.
2. Production papers placed in larger cartons with legal size manila folders each labeled with the name of a show – starting with Broadway, then off-B’way/ regional, unproduced special concerts, television, dance, films, industrials, recordings, and finally shows for individual artists.
3. Photographs
4. Musical Scores

On my first trip to New York last September, over a three-day period, I tried various methods of note taking

• Typing directly into my laptop
• Typing into my palm with small wireless keyboard
• And dictating sotto voce into a Sony minidisc recorder


I was allowed to request photocopies and did so for some items. Now these findings have to be integrated with other research amassed in paper and electronic forms, and it is time to come up with a workable system. At the moment, I have plastic 1-2” folders labeled by decade on a rolling cart in my office, and on my computer, I have organized my electronic folders as shown in the first image.

Most of these folder titles are self-explanatory. Interview Notes are my notes taken during the course of an interview, mostly superfluous in that I also have the audio files of the interviews as well as written verbatim transcripts, however, I do find the occasional idea or reminder note to myself about a thought or impression I had during the interview. Also, for those interviews that took place in person, my notes are likely to include visual descriptions.

The Misc Scans folder holds scanned images that do not yet fit in any other folder category. New Luther files are those files that I come across or create while doing research and have not yet decided where to file. (I know, I could save time if I filed them as I found them, but usually that’s not an option as I may not be connected to my main files. Often, as I mentioned above, I might be taking notes on my Palm and it may be several days and many files later transfer them to my computer.) Pictures, at the moment, are separated by where they were obtained, but that will soon change as I move them to the folders that correspond to their content. The bulk of my filing goes into the Research folder, which I’ll show you in a moment, and the rest is pretty straightforward.

The Research folder is subdivided as shown in the screenshot below on the left, and the bulk of the story will ultimately migrate to the Events folder that, as of now, is strictly chronological (a portion of it is on the right).

I’m not sure why, but to preserve things as I found or acquired them, I copy and paste sections into new files and when done, store the original in a folder called XX-NoLongerInUse. So, for example, as I review my dictated notes from the Schomburg, which contain material that applies to many different subjects and events over many years, I copy and paste paragraphs into the appropriate documents that are filed in the research section according to year and subject/event, or perhaps into the people or background folders also within the research section. One of the reasons this is important is to maintain the full context from whence the information came.

As you can see from these screenshots, my electronic filing system uses only the Windows Explorer and my text documents are Word docs. But a number of specialized tools for data organization exist and I have been wondering whether to use one of them.
This is an often-discussed subject among researchers and reporters as we often feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data. One writer recently touted Microsoft’s One Note, citing the usefulness of the notebook-like tabs and the ability to drop web pages and even audio links into the Note. But most of the programs I’ve heard about do only one task well – organize notes, file and retrieve data, write, handle footnotes and endnotes, or compile bibliographic info… – forcing us to use separate programs for each task.

In the words of one writer, “So if you’re writing away and suddenly need to check your research, you need to minimize the manuscript and call up a separate program to find your notes. Not a big deal, but wouldn’t it be neat if everything was housed together.”

I’ve heard that Scribe is a note organizer created with historians in mind and one writer called it “a *very* nice note-taking and research/reference database program.” Then there are the programs with writerly names like RoughDraft, PageFour, WriteWay Pro, Liquid Story Binder, StoryView and NewNovelist, PageFour, and Scrivener.

Some software developers approach the problem by creating a suite of products, for example the word processor Nota Bene, combined with Nota Bene Ibidem, a database system to handle bibliography/notes, and Nota Bene Orbis, “a text retrieval system for instantly and simultaneously searching papers, research notes, lectures, field notes, lists…”

Some enterprising writers create their own databases with fields such as Character, Date, Place, Description, Bibliographic reference, Chapter, and so on. I have not resorted to this extreme yet, although I have created a three-column table with the heading “People and the events to which they are connected” so I could see at a glance sorting by event, who was involved in what, or sorting by year, what was happening when.

I haven’t yet determined whether this will be useful or not, but at the time it made me feel like I have some control over the data. Meanwhile, I am evaluating two programs for possible use: AskSam or WriteWay. I’ll let you know if I decide to use either one.