This process blog is focusing on two things: my data management (or lack of), and citations.
Firstly, I think my data management was a lesson in “URT-ing”. While I cited my data well, I found that much of the information I needed to refer back to my original references to make sure the data was correct. This resulted in a lot of time wasted, and a much slower URT-ing process. I think I would have benefited from an excercise in the URT-tool – perhaps an in class session where we were required to bring 3 – 5 records for import. It would have given me a much better sense of the amount of time (and the ways I needed to clean up data) in my “process”. That being said, I can now appreciate Shannon’s sage wisdom “narrow your focus” much more. I’m hoping the end result will be an interesting argument with data that clearly demonstrates my goals.
And now for my eureka moment of the day: I was really concerned about the amount of time I was going to need to cite each and every record, so I came up with a solution today (eureka!) to create a record type called “Citation” and in the other record types, I would create a “citation reference” as well as a citation field. Since much of my data comes from one source (for reasons I will explain soon), rather than having to reenter the citation fields over an over (a process which would have taken me days), I am entering just the page numbers in the citation fields and then referring to the record with the full citation data. I hope that works for the URT!