Given the increasingly digital nature of research, including not only websites but blogs, forums, wikis, the (in my view), beloved moleskin is becoming increasingly outdated.
I’ve just finished writing my first book and had the joy of using moleskin notebooks to note down urls and make notes. I like moleskins a lot but pen and paper does have its limitations when searching. I also bookmarked pages but changing computers has lost a few of these.
I’m just starting the research on a new book and looking around for any open source / free software to capture a url, mark it with the time accessed (for later bibliographical purposes), capture the raw HTML, and possibly allow me to tag it for folksonomical reference if I want. What would be sort of cool is to have an interface to share the results later or just post an XML / RDF file to be posted later.
I suppose what I essentially want to find is something along the lines of a moleskin for electronic notes? I can see various subscription services listed but I really want something on the desktop to create a relevant project archive to later share. Potentially this does add to the issue of lots of mini-silos by creating more but if , in Bibliographica style, they could be linked or linkable, I think it could be an interesting way of sharing research links or allowing bodies to create a meta-frame calling from the shared resources.
I think that this falls into the realm of archiving, which poses issues in the UK, especially when it concerns commercial sites as my reading of the consultation has it. Wired UK has an article on the issues of archiving web sites in Britain and the legal difficulties therein. The British Library has been working on an archive (including some from shops no longer extant) but can only archive the site if the copyright holder has given permission. Even the consultation paper (itself archived now) is vague on this.
Ultimately this will hobble research if ways of noting and sharing the relevant data and metadata cannot be found to allow sharing and relevant notation. It would also mean that I’m left to the vagaries of my browser or remembering to make a note of the link in a new moleskin.
Building something along the lines of what I want might create a tool which other people might find useful.
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