Question about how to use Bookends

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NicholasIb
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Joined: Wed May 08, 2013 8:58 am

Question about how to use Bookends

Post by NicholasIb »

Dear all,

I am looking for some advice. I am a post-graduate student using Bookends with Scrivener (and Word). During my research when writing essays or my dissertation I've tended to write pages of personal notes summarising my interest in particular books and journal articles within the structure of Scrivener.

However, I'm looking to move all of these into Bookends and organise them to be attached to the relevant reference, rather than relating them to a specific essay I've written.

My question is this - I could either copy each page of notes and attach as an attachment (creating a text file attachment to be held alongside all of my journal PDF attachments). This would be indexed by Spotlight search on my Mac, and would leave all the text outside of the Bookends database, just a link to the file. Or I could use the Notes features in Bookends to more closely integrate my notes with the reference and the database (and allow me to use keywords, which I'm unlikely to do at the moment).

My instinct is to do the former, but I don't want to start moving all the material and then realise that it would have been better to do the latter. Also, there is a new version coming soon, 12, which might have some bearing on my choice.

I'd be interested to hear how others use Bookends to organise your research notes and the benefits you've found with particular approaches?

Many thanks in advance,

Nic
Jon
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Re: Question about how to use Bookends

Post by Jon »

I hope others will share their experiences. The former has the advantage that you get spotlight indexing, but not much else. The latter gives you automatic tag cloud generation from your notes (if you find that helpful) and the ability to keep notes as notecards in a note stream. Furthermore, the reference/notes can be hyperlinked to Scrivener and other apps that accept such links. So I guess I'd opt for the latter (but again, it's not much more work to do both than to do one -- you could also save the attachment as a pdf, in which case you can do a spotlight search for it from within Bookends).

Jon
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NicholasIb
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Joined: Wed May 08, 2013 8:58 am

Re: Question about how to use Bookends

Post by NicholasIb »

Thank you for the tips and suggestions Jon!

It does sound like the notes field is the better option, my only concern was that I use the Online Search option to import citations and there are often additional fields which get appended to the notes (such as Amazon price or Times cited in Google Scholar) and I wanted to confirm that these would not replace or mess up any notes I set up of my own. In the vast majority of cases however I use the Import function to create the reference in the first place and I would be only adding my research notes afterwards. I'd just prefer to keep these additional fields clearly separate from my research notes.

Like you, I'm keen to hear how other users organise their research in Bookends.

Thanks again,

Nic
taja
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Re: Question about how to use Bookends

Post by taja »

I am also postgrad student using Bookends, Scrivener and Word (though only in the very final stages of writing). I also use Devonthink Pro, which I recommend you take a look at. When I started research, I roughly followed your first option, taking notes per book/article in Word documents and attaching them to particular references in Bookends.

I gradually found this to be a really inflexible system, leading to hundreds of often quite large documents organised around books and articles rather than ideas or themes. So I began breaking up my notes into smaller chunks, based around quotations and PDF annotations made in Skim, and saving them into Devonthink Pro. DTP has a powerful tagging and search system that allows you to organise your notes simultaneously in a folder hierarchy (as you can do in finder) based on bibliographic entries from Bookends (they now work together much better than they did when I started using them both), and by essay and theme, all without creating duplicate files. It has powerful tagging and keyword features that allow you to view these notes by concept and theme outside the folder hierarchy.

Rather than a notetaking system, I use Bookends as a PDF and reference manager, citation app for my notes, and bibliographic formatter. But also as a way of planning my reading through the tag cloud, smart groups and hierarchical folder structure. I use DTP, linked to Bookends references via hyperlinks and temporary citations, to organise my notes. I then use Scrivener to plan and write in, rather than as a repository for notes.

The workflow I ended up with might sound distant from the second option you mentioned, but even if you're not interested in DTP and want to use Bookends to organise your notes, I suggest you take option two, using notecards, for one major reason: granularity. If you use big documents attached to Bookends database entries, you will have to work hard at the planning stage of writing; you'll have to comb through quite big documents, organised by text rather than theme, to find the material relevant to your ideas. Bookends notecards will give you much more flexibility, somewhat akin to using DTP; as Jon says, you can integrate them into Scrivener (or even DTP, if you decide to try it) and also access them easily if you use Bookends on Tap. The tag cloud generation Jon mentioned will also achieve some of the things that I mentioned DTP doing above.

I would also highly recommend using Skim to annotate your PDFs, if you're not doing so already.
Last edited by taja on Thu May 09, 2013 5:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
Jon
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Re: Question about how to use Bookends

Post by Jon »

Note also that you can edit the import filter so that nothing is imported into Notes if you don't want it to be (remove any tags in the filter that are in front of the Notes field). But I can confirm that they won't replace any notes you enter, they will be appended to any text already in the Notes field. But that's only a concern for newly imported references -- if you have a reference and have added notes, there is no more import option (except Autofill From Internet, which *will* replace any field you might have.

Jon
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NicholasIb
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Re: Question about how to use Bookends

Post by NicholasIb »

Tana - thanks for taking time to share your workflow with me - I'm taking a look at DEVONthink now.

And Jon - thanks for your continued help, I think that whatever happens, I'm going to avoid the attached file method and break the notes down to quote/page level and think about a more structured approach!

For simplicity I'm not sure I want too many databases but I think it's right to use scrivener for assembling my writing rather than storing and organising notes!
taja
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Re: Question about how to use Bookends

Post by taja »

This is a useful piece on integrating DTP with Bookends: http://parezcoydigo.wordpress.com/2008/ ... h-part-ii/ Though bear in mind that both pieces of software have come a long way since 2008.

Also in general, don't be swayed by positive references to Sente and Papers 2 in various places; I've tried both (and a few others), and they don't come close to Bookends, for the humanities at least.
NicholasIb
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Joined: Wed May 08, 2013 8:58 am

Re: Question about how to use Bookends

Post by NicholasIb »

I've spent a long time today reading up about DEVONthink and Circus Ponies Notebook and other approaches to integrating a note-taking app with Bookends.

It seems that DEVONthink is what I'm looking for, however, having downloaded the trial version, I'm a bit stumped. I want a hierarchical view of my Bookends library of references within DevonThink so that I can click on a reference and either jump to it in Bookends, or add one or many notes (ideally being able to add a hierarchical list of notes related to pages / quotes etc) which i can then tag with themes and keywords etc.

It sounds stupid but I can't work out how you use DEVONthink - when i drag and drop a reference from Bookends it arrives as text in DevonTHINK, not a link.

Any pointers?
NicholasIb
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed May 08, 2013 8:58 am

Re: Question about how to use Bookends

Post by NicholasIb »

I'm thinking that my problem might be I've downloaded the DEVONthink Personal trial, and maybe I need to be using DEVONthink Pro? Is this to do with scripting?
Jon
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Re: Question about how to use Bookends

Post by Jon »

Try holding down Option+Command in Bookends and then dragging the reference to DT. Or use Edit -> Copy Hypertext Link and then pasting into DT.

Jon
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jzents
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Re: Question about how to use Bookends

Post by jzents »

Jon wrote:Try holding down Option+Command in Bookends and then dragging the reference to DT. Or use Edit -> Copy Hypertext Link and then pasting into DT.

Jon
Sonny Software
This has been a very helpful thread, glad I found it. Question: is there now, or might there be going forward, a way to have DTPO index my notes in BE. I know I can copy the notes into DTPO and get that, but wonder if there is a way to do it without the duplication. Cheers!
Jeff Zents
South Texas College
rickl
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Re: Question about how to use Bookends

Post by rickl »

Question: is there now, or might there be going forward, a way to have DTPO index my notes in BE. I know I can copy the notes into DTPO and get that, but wonder if there is a way to do it without the duplication.
You could adopt one of Jon's suggestions from earlier in the thread: use both of the methods you mentioned at the beginning. From DTPO's File menu, choose Index and point at your Bookends Attachments folder. DTPO will index the content of all your attachments, including the content of your attached notes.
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