Organizing Your Documents

Created by , 2022

Keeping track of your physical and digital documents, your work progress, and your publication requires preparation and forethought. In this lesson, you’ll explore various tools and methods for tracking and managing your project.

  • Approx. 3 hours to complete
  • Self-paced, progress at your own speed
  • 100% Online
  • Free

This course is part of the Fundamentals Series

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About this course

Keeping track of your physical and digital documents, your work progress, and your publication requires preparation and forethought. In this course, you’ll explore various tools and methods for tracking and managing your project.

What you'll learn

  1. to apply organizational practices when publishing historical documents.
  2. to identify how you can use metadata to control information while developing your project.
  3. to identify the kinds of systems you can use to control information while developing your project.
  4. to develop a system for organizing your documents.

Course Glossary

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  • A version of a person’s name that is used every time when referencing that individual, such as in annotation or metadata.

  • A consistent or standardized way of describing data. For example, one practitioner working with poems may choose to describe the creators of these source materials as "Author," whereas a practitioner working with correspondence may choose to describe the creators of those source materials as "Sender." Regardless of what these practitioners choose, both have used a controlled vocabulary by standardizing how they describe the source material's creator. Practitioners can develop their own controlled vocabulary, use an existing controlled vocabulary, or a combination of both. Examples of existing controlled vocabularies can be found at the University of North Carolina Library: https://guides.lib.unc.edu/c.php?g=8749&p=44502.

  • The process of writing down the policy decisions that you have made in order to share them with readers and ensure that you apply them consistently.

  • The application of a system for locating specific documents or groups of documents in your collection. Creating such a system involves defining what metadata needs to be collected for each document, and then consistently and accurately collecting that metadata.

  • A structure developed for creating meaningful divisions between documents. Closely related to document control, document organization refers to the framework by which documents are organized, whereas document control refers to the practical application of that framework.

  • Essentially, data about data. It can be used to describe the content, physical or structural features, and/or administrative elements of data. In providing such descriptions, metadata supports the management and discoverability of data. See the University of North Carolina Library's definition of metadata for more information: https://guides.lib.unc.edu/metadata/definition.