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I am known to be an organized person, I worked as a Marketing Director for over 12 years a job that requires an intense degree of data management, and organization. That being said, organizing myself to engage with research is a little daunting as again I am still not sure on my topic (hence I find myself looking at many research topics), and I am a little old school in tending to use physical books and printed papers. Coming into this program I had only given a brief thought to the degree of organization that might be required and somewhere in the depths of my brain, I imagined using spreadsheets to track things as that is 100% within my wheelhouse.

Starting the program I realized very quickly that organization would be central to not only sense-making but being able to properly reference and cite a lot of information from a variety of sources. I still thought somewhat in my head that I would use a spreadsheet or a set of linked ones. Then very quickly we were introduced to Zotero and my interest was immediately piqued when we were told it could cite for us (I always find citing difficult and/or tedious). Really, the introduction of Zotero in this has been a lifesaver as it is easy to save, organize, highlight, stage, make notes and cite all of our research. I have been making a lot of folders and subfolders and highlighting as I read. I also started playing with tags as another means to group and organize. I love how easy it is to add/edit metadata and the plugins for Word and Google Docs. I do still like to read printed materials rather than a screen (I am old school) so for some things I have been printing them for the first read, and then doing a second read in Zotero with the highlighting on the second read to save quotes and also adding notes.

I do also still have a Google Drive folder with sheets and docs. One thing I plan to track on spreadsheets is library search terms. While working on the initial research for our group project and general interests I found that sometimes I would have to close my UVIC library tab for a variety of reasons. And then I would either lose a search that had brought up a lot of great results or I would want to search more and would forget some of the terms/sets of terms I had already searched. I know library database searching is an art form in itself and I further hope to use the search term tracking (and notes) to improve my future searches. I also may use a spreadsheet to keep track of articles to search that come from the bibliographies of other articles. I don’t always have time/need to immediately search for these journals. nor do I always want to have to dig back through previously read journal articles to search their bibliographies.