 Welcome to the second module in our unit on reading and annotating content in Zotero. In the last module, I showed you how to create and edit notes in Zotero. In this module, I'll cover some ways that you might use them. This module covers these suggestions, using notes in combination with collections or as attachments to items, a note card technique for collecting notes by topic, and an article notes technique for creating notes associated with a specific item, such as a journal article or book chapter. As you can see, this module is focused on the notes function that is built into Zotero. Of course, there are lots of other ways to take notes digitally. In module 4 of this unit, I'll be showing you how you can create notes and annotations directly in PDF files and pull those into Zotero as well. But let's deal with Zotero's built-in notes first. To follow along in this module, you need to have Zotero installed on your computer. You can get the software at Zotero.org. And for more information on the basics of using Zotero, see our online guide or check out the mastering Zotero guide on GitHub. This module also uses examples from a sample Zotero library. You can use your own Zotero library to try out the features I cover, but I've also made the sample items for this course available for you to import into your own Zotero library. That way you can see exactly what I see and follow along click by click. To learn how to get and import these sample items, see the course setup module and come back to this one when you're ready. If you've been doing university-level work for a while and are used to working with papers, sources, printed articles, etc., your desk probably looks a little bit like this. But when I'm making notes on a book, I might jot things on stickies and use those as bookmarks. I might make a separate set of notes in a notebook. I'll have a to-do list on a scratchpad, random notes all over the place with ideas on things I want to follow up on or new sources I want to find. The bottom line is that it ends up being a big mess. Zotero can help keep your work organized. Some of this is more or less automatic just because of the way Zotero organizes things. For example, I make some typed notes on an article and attach that note to a Zotero item, which keeps them together. If I have collections based on topics or themes, I can keep standalone notes inside those collections. I can also use tags with my notes, just like any other Zotero item, so if there are multiple ideas in the note, I can use tags to track them. If the note mentions other notes or other Zotero items, such as journal articles, I can list those in the related items. These organizational features are great for keeping things together, but perhaps one of the nicest things about notes being stored in Zotero is that I can use the built-in search function to find my notes and related content at any time. So why does this matter? Well, if you've ever flipped through a book stuffed with sticky notes because you're pretty sure you wrote the name of an interesting author in one of them, but you just can't remember where, Zotero can save you a lot of time. There are probably an endless number of ways to use notes in Zotero, but I'm going to show you two approaches you might want to try. The first is based on creating loose collections of ideas, facts, and other tidbits that you can organize later. The second is based on making notes on entire articles or book chapters. So let's talk first about using notes related to topics or subtopics. This approach to writing notes designed to set you up so that you can organize and combine ideas later is sometimes called the note card system. If you're the sort of person who likes to make notes on index cards, this might work well for you. The paper-based version of the note card system uses index cards. Each card represents one quotation, a paraphrased idea or summary, and the card also contains information about the source document and location like a page number. Most importantly, you also mark each card with a topic, theme, or category. The process of creating these topics keeps you focused on what's important to your research and your work while you're reading. And once you have a stack of cards, you can organize them by topic and use them to start building your paper, your assignment. Let's use this system in Zotero. For this example, I'm doing some research on the Halifax Harbor Explosion of 1917, and I want to use Zotero notes instead of physical index cards. I have an entry for an Encyclopedia Britannica article on a settlement that was affected by the explosion, and I'm going to read it as part of my research. I'll right-click on the item and select Add Note. This creates a new note for me, and because it's attached to the Encyclopedia article, I know that whatever I put in this note is about this item. As a result, I don't need to put any other source information in my note. Now I'm going to read the article. The Encyclopedia article is about one of the settlements affected by the Halifax Explosion. Afrikville was a black community located north of Halifax along Bedford Bay, and I want to keep track of information I find about the settlement in the papers I'm reading. This Encyclopedia article on Afrikville points out that none of the relief money donations from the Halifax Explosion were used to repair or rebuild damaged homes in Afrikville. I'm going to paraphrase this information in my note just by typing it in. I'll also add that this information came from paragraph 8 of the article in case I need to cite it or locate it later. And by the way, I'm counting paragraphs here because this is an online article and it doesn't have page numbers. So based on the note card system, the only other thing that's missing is the topic for this note card. And when Unit 1, we talked about how tags are great for tracking themes, topics, and keywords in Zotero. So I'm going to use a tag to record my topic. I'll click in the tags area under this note and type Afrikville. Now let's compare this Zotero note to the physical version we do on paper. We used a tag for the topic. We know the source because the note is attached to the source. And the idea we want to capture, as well as the page or paragraph reference, is in the note itself. So this is everything we need. There are a couple of nice things about using tags for the topics, maybe even better than doing this on paper. First, obviously, I can add more than one if I want. For example, this paragraph also talks about damage from the Halifax explosion, so I can add a tag called damage. Second, if I decide to edit this tag later because I've thought about my topics and I want to change them. If I want to remove the tags, if I want to combine the tags with other ones, these are easy things to do in Zotero. And you can see how to do this in Unit 1, Module 3. That's basically it. Using this method, you might create many notes for an article tagged with multiple topics. In the note card system, the goal is to put one piece of information in each note. So for a big project, you can end up with a whole lot of these. So now let's say I've done all my readings and I want to start pulling things together. All I have to do is select the collection I'm using for my items or my library. And then in the tag selector, I'll select the AFRICVIL tag. Now look what happens. All of my notes on AFRICVIL across all of the articles I've read appear highlighted in Zotero's center panel. And remember how I tagged a few notes with multiple topics? Let's say I want to see only the notes I made where I cover the explosion damage in AFRICVIL. All I need to do is add damages to my already selected AFRICVIL tag. And right away I see notes that cover both topics together. When you use tags like this, it's easy to see all your notes grouped together by topic, and that can help you plan and complete your writing. Another tip for keeping track of topic based notes like these involves using the saved searches feature in Zotero. And there's a module on that in Unit 5. The second approach I'm going to talk about is using notes on individual articles, this is known as the article notes method. In the paper version of this method, you might use a notebook entry to keep track of your thoughts, paraphrases, and quotations while you read an article. I might paraphrase the main idea, I can jot down quotations I like and the page they come from. I might write down some of my own thoughts, criticism, observations, new questions, there's no set way to do this and over time you'll develop your own system. You can do it free form, but I like to use a more formal system where I divide the notes into specific sections like summary, quotations, new citations to find, etc. To do this in Zotero, I simply use a Zotero note as my notebook. We'd set it up the same way that we do in the note card system. Add the note as an attachment to the article item. I'll right click on my article item, I'm going to use this article by Bob Yer in the Halifax Explosion collection and select Add Note. The new note appears as an attachment for the article and on the right hand side of Zotero I have a window where I can enter and format text. To make it easier to make notes while I'm reading, I use this edit in a separate window button and put the note in its own window. Then I'll open the PDF file to read and make my notes. That way I can leave it up next to my PDF reader and make notes as I go without having to juggle too many windows. In the text of the note, I can keep track of my thoughts on the article. I can paraphrase the main idea, jot down quotations I like, the page they come from. I might write down some of my own thoughts, criticism, questions, and more. Here's an example of one of my article notes on this article by Colligan and McPhee. You'll see that I wrote a sentence or two about the main point in the article, a question that came up while I was reading, an observation, and a couple of quotes. And I use the formatting features to turn these into headings in the text editor, in sections like this. Some people like to use different color or highlights to categorize their notes, and that's great too. Use whatever technique here that works for you. If this whole idea is new to you though, I'm including a couple of links to guides that are specific to taking notes on articles, course readings, and research, and I cannot recommend them enough. The guide from Trent University suggests some headings for note taking. Quotations, facts and figures, paraphrases and summaries, observations, and more, I like their model. But I don't want to enter these headings for every article, every time I create a new note. The good news is that I can set up a standalone note in Zotero that I can use as a template. Here's how. Go to your library in Zotero and create a new standalone note. The term standalone just means that the note will not be attached to any other item in the library. The first line of the note will become the title that I see in the item pane in the center, so enter something like underscore article notes template. Starting the title with an underscore means that you'll always be able to find the template when you sort your items alphabetically, since the underscore will put the note at the very top of the list. I'll add some headings to this template. Summary, quotations, observations, questions, words and ideas to look up, new citations, and to make it look nice, I'll use the heading style to divide things neatly. And these headings should be self-explanatory about what I'll put in them. For example, any direct quotes I like will go in this section, new questions I think everything's I want to look up will go here. And if the article mentions other sources that I'd like to check out later, I'll list those here. Before I finish the template, I'll add a tag to it. I'm going to call this tag underscore notes. Using the underscore at the beginning will make sure that it will always appear at the top of the list in my tag selector. Another way to do it is to right click on the tag name and assign a color to it, since any tag with an assigned color is always listed first in the tag selector. Now, here's why I'm putting a tag on my template. Every time I use this template to create a note, it will be created with the notes tag already assigned. That way I can easily see all my article notes by just filtering for the notes tag. And just like the note card system, I can use multiple tags on my notes if I want. So let's see this in action. When I want to make notes on an article, I'll create a duplicate of this template. So I'll right click on the template and select Duplicate this item. If it's not already there, I'll drag the duplicate to the collection where I want it. This is going in my Halifax Explosion collection. And then I'll attach it to the article that I'm making notes on by just dragging it on to the item. I'm going to use the template this time to make notes on this article by Jacob Remus. I can add whatever text I want as I'm reading and finding things of interest. The note will stay with the article and the notes tag will make it easy to find later when I'm collecting everything. If I make connections between this article and other things I'm reading, I can use the related items to reference those. And as I mentioned a moment ago, I can add whatever other tags I want to the note as well. The nice thing about using this strategy of having a template is that it expands to fit any project because you can use as many different templates as you want set up in any way you want. For example, you can create different standalone notes templates for different purposes or different styles of note taking, it's all up to you. So I've covered two note taking strategies that work well with Sotero's notes features. Both of the approaches I've covered provide a way to combine two things. First, the free format of notes lets you jot down anything you want while you're reading and working. Second, the ability to put notes in collections, to attach them to items, to label them with tags, or to generate reports that include your notes, makes it easier to find and use your work later. This is much better than rifling through your desk looking for that sticky note that you lost. This module isn't intended to cover everything you can do with notes. There are countless ways you can use them in combination with tags and collections and I encourage you to explore and find a system that works for you. The benefit is that Sotero gives you one place to store all your notes and makes it easier to find and use them later. In the next module, I'll show you how you can generate reports based on this kind of work, which makes creating things like annotated bibliographies much easier.