Vetting the data

Well, now that I've returned to the good ole US of A and took a week off to get back into the swing of things, I'm turning my attention to going through all of the material I collected on my trip. I'm taking a page out of the research strategies of one of my professors at LUC, Dr. Lew Erenberg. He uses a database program to keep track of all his notes for his various projects. I figured it couldn't hurt to look into something similar. I found a program called Bento for my Mac that is pretty much everything I'd need. It allows be to create custom templates with whatever input fields I deem necessary. It allows you to create a Library and collections within that library as well. This is great because you can select the library and run a search and it will pull records from all of the collections. I wanted something with tagging, sort of like the labels function on blogspot. Since it wasn't possible to use hyperlinks within the program I just created a "Keywords" field. While it doesn't keep track of all the keywords throughout the library, it does so within each collection, which helps with consistency. So in essence, I've got a tag-like process going on. I've already been able to copy all of my typed notes into the program and I'm sure it will be useful when going through all the jpegs and pdfs I've accumulated. Just a make a record for each, put in a reference to the picture or file, and type in whatever notes on that document. Money.