AskBeehaw

2012 readers

1 users here now

An open-ended community for asking and answering various questions! Permissive of asks, AMAs, and OOTLs (out-of-the-loop) alike.

In the absence of flairs, questions requesting more thought-out answers can be marked by putting [SERIOUS] in the title.

Subcommunity of Chat

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

alyaza

thrawn21

UngodlyAudrey

Tips for doing archival research (self.askbeehaw)

submitted 3 weeks ago by Lionir to c/askbeehaw

2 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] bbbhltz 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Lionir 3 points 3 weeks ago

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.