The Bedford Researcher -- Chapter 6 Summary

The Bedford Researcher Chapter 6: Managing Information and Taking Notes (MITN) is one of the most helpful chapters of the book for organization. It gives the reader the insight into how to save and organize the information they find so that he/she can use it effectively in their paper. The reader will accumulate their own written notes, printouts from Web pages, articles, photocopies of book chapters, books, magazines, newspapers, letters, printed email messages, etc. that will all be useful in the structure of their paper. Chapter 6 advises using filing systems to avoid a cluttered desk or a stuffed backpack. A great way to locate the information you've stored, according to Bedford, is to date everything in print you've collected, and put it all in order by date. To save and organize digital information, MITN suggests saving work in a single folder, using descriptive file names to easily locate material.  Chapter 6 discusses using a hard drive, flash drive, having smartphone access, bookmarking the pages, using web capture, web document sites, emailing yourself the documents, or even using bedfordresearcher.com. At all costs, back up your data. Back it up no matter what strategy you're using for digital information storage.