Historical Note-Taking
in the Digital Age

Roy Rosenzweig

A Century of 3” x 5” Cards

In 1888, Frank Hugh Foster, a professor at Oberlin Theological Seminary, published one of the first practical manuals for the study of history, The Seminary Method of Original Study in the Historical Sciences: Illustrated from Church History. In the chapter on “the method of original study,” Foster sets out a typical scenario: “the student has received his topic from the director of the seminary, and has seated himself at his table to begin his work.” “With all this reading and thinking,” he continues, “note-taking must go hand in hand.” But what kind of note-taking? Foster advises that the student “use loose small sheets of paper, a quarter of a fool’s cap page, and write on only one side” (1).

The reference to fool’s cap may jar modern ears, but his recommendation is actually quite close to popular twentieth-century practice. One-quarter of a fool’s cap sheet (17 x 13½ inches) is quite close to 3” x 5” index card that many of us grew up using for our note-taking. To be sure, some authors such as Norman Cantor and Richard Schneider (in their widely read 1967 guide to How To Study History) insist that researchers use more capacious 5” x 8” cards for note-taking and reserve 3” x 5” cards for bibliographic references (2). But the index card remains enshrined in the historian’s toolkit and continues to be recommended by handbooks published more than a quarter century after the appearance of the personal computer.

The index card persists in the face of major changes in the research process— such as the appearance of literally tens of millions of pages of historical documents in digital form—and the wide use of inexpensive digital scanners and cameras to capture historical evidence. Historians now find or capture their sources in digital form yet organize them with methods developed in the era of the paper note card. As a result of this mismatch, the University of Minnesota Library recently concluded, methods of organization for researchers in the humanities and social sciences “are haphazard, idiosyncratic, and often bordering on untenable” (3). 

Goodbye 3” x 5” cards.
Hello Zotero.

Developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Zotero is a free, open-source extension to the popular Mozilla Firefox web browser intended to get beyond the haphazard and to improve on the ancient technology of the index card in at least four major ways:

• Capture your references automatically: The venerable index card system requires you to handwrite each bibliographic reference; even electronic reference programs generally necessitate cutting and pasting author, title, and publisher into the proper fields (or alternatively setting up complicated interchange systems to automate the process). Zotero captures the citation information (what the librarians call metadata) with one click. On most library catalogs and reference databases (e.g., JSTOR, America: History and Life) and many popular resources (e.g., Amazon and the New York Times), Zotero automatically “senses” the presence of the bibliographic information and places it in the proper fields in your database. (See Figure 1.) If, as in JSTOR, the actual article is available for download, Zotero automatically grabs that as well.
• Put your notes in multiple places at once: Once you have captured the metadata, you can link as many virtual “note cards” to it as you like or import other attachments (which can be dragged into the Zotero window that opens in the bottom of the Firefox browser). The Zotero organizational scheme, which is based on popular computer applications such as iTunes, is intuitive and, hence, easily learned. (See Figure 2.) You can drag those digital images you snapped on your last archival trip into your Zotero library and organize them in relation to notes and metadata rather than randomly store them on your hard drive. Zotero functions both online and offline—at a distant archive or on an airplane, as well as in your office or home.

Early history manual writers like Foster earnestly recommended note-taking on “small slips” of paper to facilitate filing and organization. But with that paper based system, any note could only be filed in a single folder or shoe box—an 1863 New York Herald article on carriage riding by wealthy women in Central Park could be filed under “carriages” or “women” or “park use” but not all three. Zotero removes that limitation; you can easily create as many folders as you like and file a single note in all of them; moreover, those folders don’t have to be of a single kind. They can be topical (carriages), temporal (1860s), organizational (chapter 5), or conceptual (class).

• Find it quickly: The shoebox organization scheme relied heavily on personal memory. If you didn’t recall that your notes on that 1863 article also mentioned ice skating, you could be out of luck. But like any electronic system Zotero can find any word in any note card (or full text of an article for that matter) instantly. And it can do considerably more than that by searching on any field that you choose, including your own keywords or “tags.” Tags not only make it easy to find things, they also allow new ways of organizing your data. For example, you can tag a reference or note not just by topic but also by an action that you need to take such as “must read this.” Moreover, Zotero allows you to create “smart” or “saved” searches that automatically update as you add new tagged items. And, if that “must read this” folder starts to get uncomfortably large, you can create a new smart search that only includes those items that have been added to your “must read” list in the past month.
• Export it seamlessly: Because Zotero lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; because it runs on your personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there. You can export your references quickly to Microsoft Word or Writer (Open Office.org’s wordprocessor), where they will be formatted according to your dictates (e.g., MLA or Chicago Manual of Style). Those who prefer to read their notes on paper can create “reports” in a variety of formats. You can also directly drag references from Zotero to other applications such as Google Docs. As a free and open source project, Zotero is not interested in locking you into a proprietary format and, hence, offers easy export to and import from other common formats (e.g., RIS, BibTeX, RDF).

Zotero includes many other features—for example, the ability to quickly capture and annotate web pages—which are described in full on the website, <http://www.zotero.org>, where you will also find documentation and tutorials. Installation takes less than a minute. And because Zotero functions as an extension to Firefox, it runs on all major operating systems—Macintosh, Windows, and Linux.

The Future of Note-Taking

We are continually updating Zotero with more citation styles, the ability for Zotero to recognize even more online resources, and even better support for importing and exporting entire collections. And coming soon, Zotero users will be able to share their collections with other users, collaborate on research projects using Zotero, send their collections to other free web services (such as mapping or translation sites), and receive recommendations and feeds of new resources that might be of interest. In short, over the next year Zotero will expand from an already helpful browser extension into a full-fledged tool for digital research and communications. 

Endnotes

1. Frank Hugh Foster, The Seminary Method of Original Study in the Historical Sciences: Illustrated from Church History (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1888), 32. Thanks to Rob Townsend for this reference.
2. Richard I. Schneider and Norman F. Cantor, How to Study History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1967), 200.
3. University of Minnesota Libraries, A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Academic Support (2006), 24.