I’m currently doing research to cover 50 years of history for a student union.
Most of the documentation comes from primary sources - minutes, photos, student newspapers. It’s so many documents. 50 years is a long time it turns out.
I’m currently managing sources using Zotero and putting information down in Microsoft Word. I currently divide my sources by decade.
Do you have any tips from doing similar types of research?
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I think the breakdown by decade is a good idea, and obviously keeping a bibliography is key.
You can also keep a journal of what you are working on in case you remember something important but didn’t save it, then you can cross-reference calendars and journals to track down the source again.
That’s a good tip - so far what I’ve done is I have this note in Zotero of “Things to enter into bibliography”.
The way I keep track of information source is that every sentence I write has atleast one source. This is probably a bad way to do things as I now have 180 footnotes and I’m not nearly done with the first decade.
Some libraries offer microform. They tend to be old copies of newspapers and other notable documents.
When you’re making copies of stuff for sources also record where and how you found it, not just the source.
Keep in mind sometimes original sources can be mistaken, so try to find more examples.
Yes - I did scan some of the newspapers I wanted with microform. Unfortunately, the quality for the student newspapers rendered certain block of texts and pictures unreadable. It’s still an invaluable resource!
For what I’m looking into, which is mostly primary documents, I thankfully don’t need to worry too much about mistakes - I’m mostly worried about missing documentation (no meeting minutes, no student newspaper) and unreported events.
I just wanted to say thank you since I forgot to answer (I’ve been off socials for a bit)