You can use Zotero to organize your research materials (e.g. citations, notes, PDFs).
For History 91, you might take photos of documents in archives, save images and PDFs from databases, and/or scan pages from books. Tropy is a free tool that can help you organize these images. By tagging and grouping your images, you can find them more easily while writing.
Research is a larger process of inquiry. Searching is how you find partial answers.
Keeping track of your searches:
- help you make sense of your research process
- saves time by avoiding duplicated effort
Key elements of a search log:
- Write down your question(s) and interest(s)
- Where you searched (e.g. JSTOR, Tripod) and when
- What you did (which keywords? advanced search?)
- How well did it go? What did you gain? What's next?