I'm wondering whether there are ways in Reunion to track/automate the research process in a methodical way?
Right now I use a research log (a spreadsheet with several columns that can be sorted and color coded) to plan out my future research and keep track of my past research. I list the sources I plan to search and have columns to record the date when films are ordered, when they were searched, the complete source reference, what I was looking for, what was found (or, more often, that nothing was found), etc. I can also select by the contents of certain files to produce reports from these spreadsheets with subsets of the data. They serve as a advance list of what I intend to do, and a checklist for keeping track of what has been searched and the result.
I see this as something that should be a part of the Sources capabilities in Reunion. But in addition to keeping track of sources that provided information for my tree, I want to also keep track of the ones that didn't. And have a checklist for future research ideas. And have a way to select sources for a report.
I know Reunion has Logs - but they are very primitive, and, so far as I can tell, they don't tie in directly to the Sources. You would need to copy and paste a lot to keep things in sync.
Also, on a somewhat related note, what do people do with transcriptions of documents (eg. census transcripts)? I know you can put them in the Notes field for a person - but I really want to put them in the Source record so that they are available for all of the people mentioned in the record. I didn't see a NOTES field associated with sources. I suppose you could add a text field, but the editing panel isn't really conducive to entering multi-line transcriptions. Do you just put it in the free text field and turn off appearance in the end notes? I guess I don't really want to bother with separate MS WORD documents that are linked through the media tab.
Thanks!
Don
Right now I use a research log (a spreadsheet with several columns that can be sorted and color coded) to plan out my future research and keep track of my past research. I list the sources I plan to search and have columns to record the date when films are ordered, when they were searched, the complete source reference, what I was looking for, what was found (or, more often, that nothing was found), etc. I can also select by the contents of certain files to produce reports from these spreadsheets with subsets of the data. They serve as a advance list of what I intend to do, and a checklist for keeping track of what has been searched and the result.
I see this as something that should be a part of the Sources capabilities in Reunion. But in addition to keeping track of sources that provided information for my tree, I want to also keep track of the ones that didn't. And have a checklist for future research ideas. And have a way to select sources for a report.
I know Reunion has Logs - but they are very primitive, and, so far as I can tell, they don't tie in directly to the Sources. You would need to copy and paste a lot to keep things in sync.
Also, on a somewhat related note, what do people do with transcriptions of documents (eg. census transcripts)? I know you can put them in the Notes field for a person - but I really want to put them in the Source record so that they are available for all of the people mentioned in the record. I didn't see a NOTES field associated with sources. I suppose you could add a text field, but the editing panel isn't really conducive to entering multi-line transcriptions. Do you just put it in the free text field and turn off appearance in the end notes? I guess I don't really want to bother with separate MS WORD documents that are linked through the media tab.
Thanks!
Don
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