While working on an academic project, you collect and create a lot of information, such as scientific articles, measurement results, notes, presentations, illustrations. Managing your information properly allows you to easily find and use it yourself or store and share it with others.
To conduct your research you need to be informed and to start collecting relevant and reliable information for later use.
You will collect some information by performing a systematic search, but you may also receive articles from a teacher or fellow student, take photos, find other people’s photos, or access websites. It is important to keep track of the information you find, as well as your added notes, because:
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Think about how you intend to select and organize your information before you start collecting it.
How should I organize my files?
How should I name my files?
There are many tools for storing and processing literature, so compare a few of them and see which tool works best for you. Storing literature in a structured way from the start can save you a great deal of time in the long run. You can easily retrieve everything, and citing and paraphrasing can be done automatically and without typing errors.
This is a brief comparison of some available tools. What is of decisive importance to you?
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While you collect, store and organize your information, you can enrich it with your own associations and opinions: anything that will help you later. Examples of enrichments are notes, tags, ratings or (social) bookmarks.
Tags, reviews and ratings of fellow students can make it easier for you to quickly find the useful documents in a list of shared literature. Of course, this also works vice versa!
There are no fixed rules on how to use tagging, but it can be very beneficial for yourself and others to use some kind of system. Here are some guidelines:
1. Be consistent: the MOST important “rule”!
2. Be efficient
3. Keep your tag collection organized
Use tags that you can find again: short, memorable, and comprehensible
4. Do what works for you!
In the end, you should use a tagging strategy that works for you, even if it might be considered “bad practice”. Any system is fine, provided it suits you or your group’s purposes and enables you to easily bookmark and retrieve information easily!
In addition to tags, you can also view reviews and ratings to determine if publications found by others are of interest to you. Ratings let customers or users express their opinion about things, from travel and restaurants to books and music.
Whether you store your information on your laptop or online, it is important to create a back-up and to keep that back-up up to date.
A traditional way to store your information is in folders and files on your laptop, with a back-up on a flash drive or other portable medium.
Make sure you don’t put your laptop and the back-up of your information in the same bag!
Alternatively, you can store your information online, using one of many web-based services. Most of these offer free storage initially, with paid options for more storage space, for example:
The differences between local and online storage:
| Storage | Local | Online |
| Availability | Not particularly flexible. Only available on the device. It is however possible to change a hard drive into an online drive. | Your data is on a web-server, so you can access it from any device and location. However, to be able to acces your online storage, you obviously need an internet connection. No guarantees of continuity of the service by the provider. |
| Sharing | If you want to share your local data, you will have to take external media (CD’s, DVD’s, USB flash drives, hard drives etc.) and often make copies to do the transfer. Of course you can share your information with others by e-mail, but many types of files are too large to send. | Online sharing makes it easy to share your information with others. Some cloud services enable several people on different locations to collaborate simultaneously on the same document and keep track of all changes. |
| Security | Hard drives can be lost, stolen or broken. Information stored on hard drives may be exposed to internet hackers while browsing the web. | Online data can be accessed by hackers if the security is not good. Therefore, encrypt sensitive data. |
| Capacity | Unlimited storage. | Generous storage capacity. Most cloud services give users limited free storage, but if you need more space, you can upgrade to a paid account. |
| Back-up | Back-up to local drive. | Automatically synchronise local data to the cloud. Documents are always up-to-date. |
| Costs | Purchasing a hard drive is a one-time cost. | Online services charge monthly or annual fees for extra storage. |
If you are collaborating on a project with others, it is important that everyone can access the information they need. Think about access, versions, clear and consistent file names when sharing information, as well as about privacy and security. The website of the Stanford University Libraries offers an overview of criteria and other tips, such as:
Stanford University Libraries. (n.d.). Best practices for file naming. https://library.stanford.edu/research/data-management-services/data-best-practices/best-practices-file-naming