Speaker 1: Hey there and welcome to another behind the scenes with Julie. So today I'm going to be working on inventorying a educational material into my knowledge base that I use Notion for. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm Julie K. Hiltar with Genealogy in Action and I simplify advanced research concepts so that you can find your elusive ancestors quickly and confidently. So if you are a dedicated genealogist looking to uplevel your research skills, you are in the right place. So again, I'm going to take you behind the scenes today. I'm going to show you how I catalog my educational materials. And I also have a companion blog post that goes with this that explains kind of what my system was and what it is now and reasons why you should consider also cataloging your educational materials. So I hope you'll check that out. The link is in the video description. So let's head on over to the computer and get started. Okay, so let me explain what I am going to be doing. Last week, I attended the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh, otherwise known as GRIP. And as we were going along, I was actually recording all of my notes in Notion, which is my new knowledge hub. But one morning I was running about four minutes late and there was actually a Zoom outage. And so anybody who was already in a room was good. But if you were on the outside, you weren't getting in. So I actually missed Judy Russell's Through the Golden Door Immigration After the Civil War lecture. I missed like most of it, like almost all of it, which was unfortunate because that was kind of what my project was going to be based on. My homework project was going to be based on immigration. Go figure. Anyways, so because I didn't really have time to set up my Notion to take notes for this particular lecture because I was too busy trying to get in the room for 45 minutes, I ended up taking some handwritten notes on the syllabus. And that's what I'm going to go put in now. So I'm going to kind of show you a little bit of the knowledge hub or my knowledge base as well as how I am capturing information. So let's share my screen. You can get a better picture of it and we'll go from there. Okay. So this is my knowledge base in Notion. This is the tool that I am moving to. So it's a work in progress. And I have these different knowledge areas, one of them being genealogy. So I'm going to go ahead and go into that. And then it just pops up a little screen here that I can do stuff from here or I can open it as a page so I can do that. And basically it's kind of the hub for all sorts of things tied to this knowledge area. So there's educational materials, references and resources, records, topics, experts, publisher hosts, publications, event, and tasks. And just as a point of clarification, publisher or host, because these are actually databases, you can see over here, these are all the databases that are related to the knowledge base. So because of that, it helps me be able to generate these lists. For example, I have these educational materials and you can see all of the things that are there. So if it has a relation to this knowledge area, it's going to display it for me here because that's how it's set up to display. And I don't have to do this every single time. So that's the beauty of it. But that's a whole other topic. Anyways, the reason I have them combined is so I don't have to have a publisher, a publication, a host, and an event. And I have four different databases. And quite frankly, some of these can be duplicates. So for example, the Illinois State Genealogical Society publishes a quarterly that I may find an educational article in, but they also host their annual conference. And then the publication in that case would be the ISGS quarterly. And the event would be the ISGS 2021 conference or whatever. So that's just kind of how I chose to do this to make my life a little bit easier. I just thought I'd explain that real quick. All right. So I am going to head over here and you can see I have all these different, like I said, relational databases, and I want to go into educational materials. And this right now is showing me all my genealogy materials, and I'm not going to explain what all of this stuff is in this view. But I am going to go ahead and I'm going to go to Judy's lecture that I missed. I did create the page, but I didn't put any notes in. So basically it's just, it's filling in all of these things. And again, these are all databases. This is the knowledge area. This is the author presenter. There's a database for that. It's called experts. I can change the description here. The publisher hosts, the publication or events, in this case it was GRIP and then GRIP June 2022. The dates, related topics. This helps with me pulling information so I can go into this topics database and pull up immigration and find all of my educational materials, all of my reference materials, any records, experts that talk about it or deal with it, all sorts of things. And the reference type is lecture. And as you can see, this is not a database. This is actually just tags like you normally see in like Evernote and things like that. And same with processing status. So in this case, I am still processing this entire page because I haven't done it yet. And then the read, watch, listen status is done because I watched like a whole 15 minutes of it. I am able to actually embed the file and I'll show you how to do that in another way in just a moment. Uh, I've noted that I have a digital file and then of course I have my hard copy and then I also have checkboxes for Kindle because just in case I happen to have it on my Kindle device, like if it's a Kindle ebook or something down here is kind of all the meat of everything. So I can put in my footnote and bibliography reference so that I have them if I ever need to refer to whatever this is. I'm not going to do that at the moment. I will go back and do that later. My description summary. So usually what I do is I put in the description that was provided with like the book or the handout or the website or whatever, just so that I know what their description is. So um, but after I consume it, I come back here and I put in a summary of my own. Now I'm not going to do that cause I don't want to take up that time at the, you know, doing that, but I also need to go back and actually read the entire syllabus because there's several pages and I really want to kind of consume it because I missed, you know, like I said, 45 minutes of the lecture. So I'm not going to do that right now. Uh, notes I will do in just a moment and then here, so I can, because these are related databases, I can click on this and it will show me all of the educational materials I have that are related to these three topics that I have here. Now, if I added, you know, five other topics, then those would show up as well. So anything that belongs to that topic database or that topic in the topic database will show up here. So I see a lot of Gina because a lot of those were social history. Um, and Gideon was the other instructor. So I'm seeing a lot of those. Basically these are grips grip presentations that I just dealt with. Um, I have related references, references and resources. Now I didn't explain this earlier, but I feel there's a difference between educational materials and references and resources. So educational materials are things like our syllabus material, our lecture handouts, uh, books, websites that teach us something, a video that teaches us something, a podcast that teaches us something, a blog article, a magazine article, whatever it is that teaches us how to do something. Whereas a reference on the other hand is something like a French word list that you consult while you're translating a record or this guide to interpreting passenger lists, uh, passenger list, uh, BV annotations, uh, Marion Smith put together a great, um, guide. It is fabulous. Um, I actually didn't know about it until about a couple months ago and it's really good. So, um, Google it if you want to find it. Um, but that, that to me is a reference material. It's not teaching me anything necessarily. I mean, yeah, it is, but I'm not going to remember all that the next time I go and, uh, find a passenger list. So it's a reference material. It's I find a passenger list. Ooh, what the heck does this mean? Oh, I'll go to Marion's list and find out. Right. Okay. And then I also have related record sets. And in this case, I have not started bringing over record sets. So there's nothing here and my related content. So if I've blogged about immigration or, uh, did a, uh, course, uh, lesson on naturalization or whatever, they would show up. Uh, I also have action items. So if I'm consuming something and it's, I'm being, I'm prompting myself to do something with it, um, then I will add them here and then, uh, so original content. So what I like to do here is I embed the PDF of the actual handout because this is what it does, which is really cool. I will say that the one thing that I don't like about it is that, um, I'll go down to her references. She has all these links. See, I can't click them. Uh, it is not a usable embedded PDF. If that made any sense. Um, that's the only thing I don't like about it. Unfortunately. So, um, but it just stores it there for me so that whenever I'm in this note, because I'm using this as my hub. So if I'm, if I need to learn how to do something about that deals with immigration, for example, and I pull this up, I can just come down here, open this up and boom, I can just start skimming through this or read my notes if I have specific notes. So that's kind of the nice thing about that. Um, and I don't have to go find it in my filing system. I did my digital, you know, my computer or anything like that. I don't have to go find it and, you know, take 10 extra steps just to get it. It's just right here. Um, and then we have notes. So basically I'm going to, uh, really quickly, at least try to quickly, um, make some notes here. So I missed the first 45 minutes. Um, that's just a note to myself. Obviously that wasn't part of the lecture. Um, and then I have, let's see, so I have some notes about alien registrations. Um, if I could type, so there was 1917 act and a 1940 act, and those are both referenced in the syllabus. Um, but with the, this one, I have a note that it's an AR two form and that it is U.S. C.S. FOIA request. And then she had an example, um, that I really didn't get to take a very close look at, but she did say it was on her blog and unfortunately her blog was down that morning to go figure. Um, but I did go ahead and I did pull it up, um, before we got started. And so this is the blog post that she was referring to, and this is the actual form that she had shown us. So it's pretty cool. And I just wanted to reference it here. So I'm going to copy this link and put a note, see that, and then let's see, what else did I have? Oh, yes. And they, there were also, uh, let's do this, uh, registration booklets.

Speaker 2: But I believe they had the carry on them, but I'm going to turn this into a bulleted list and then I'm going to fold this.

Speaker 1: So that's basically the one thing I got out of it. The other thing that I got was, um, check the want ads in the newspaper, um, for negative, so for negative sentiment toward, um, ethnic groups. So for example, one of the things that she mentioned was, um, you know, there might be an ad for, you know, a housekeeper maid or something like that. And they say, Irish need not apply. Okay. Those people don't like Irish. Got it. Um, so I, I thought that was very interesting and I had never even considered looking in the want ads for that. So I made a note of that. What I am going to do next basically is to go and read this like 12 page. I don't know how many pages it is. It's like probably 10, 12 pages. Um, and read through it and then, uh, add additional notes to this. And then I will, you know, kind of move stuff around. Like for example, I think this was actually talked about before the alien registration. So I just clicked and dragged and moved that whole line up. Um, and then when I'm done, I will change my status to done. Um, another example. So go back to my database here and I'm going to open this one and there's a couple of reasons for it. One, because it is complete, I did go through this one. Um, it's, uh, I can actually change this to, I don't want to leave it in progress because I still want to read through the syllabus and add any notes that I may come across from that. So I'm going to leave that alone. Um, but down here, um, I have notes. I have extensive notes. And so, um, I ended up having a toggle for three of the different topics that we talked about. So one for cookbooks, which is pretty long, one for heirlooms, and then one for World War II rationing. And I included this table as well, um, kind of based on one of Gina's slides. Um, and then, uh, I actually, you know, have the, uh, syllabus, uh, embedded here that I can go through. And then, um, I do have action items here. So this first one is, look for German cookbooks in Midwest to add to applicable research plans and the same for the second one, which is Irish cookbooks. Um, and then I also had a note to process the resources that one of the girls, uh, in my course provided me when I asked a question and that's what, uh, these are here. These resources, um, and Gina also mentioned ads and newspaper articles provided instructions because I asked a question about, was there any information about the rationing situation, how people were to use the stamps, maybe what they meant, uh, the different books because there were four different booklets, um, things like that, just to get a better understanding of it. And, uh, Amber provided me with these three resources and Gina mentioned this, and then she did provide another resource in a later, um, lecture, uh, but that's part of the other lecture. So I will have an action item for that there. So, um, let me hop back on camera here and close this out. All right. So I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes, um, kind of showing you my note taking situation using notion. Um, I hope that it kind of got you thinking about maybe cataloging your own educational material or reference material or both. Um, because this system makes it so much easier for me to just, I need something on, I need, I need to refresh my memory on how to do this. And I can just pick that topic, get a whole list of things and be like, boom, boom, boom. And then I have what I need to do whatever it is that I'm trying to do. So, um, right now, as I said, I'm moving to notion. So things are still on a, in a gazillion other places. And if you read the companion blog article, you kind of get an idea of what I'm, what other tools I was using that I am now trying to get out of and get into the one place of notion. Um, so if you enjoyed this video, I hope that you will a like it be subscribed to my channel and click the little bell. So you'll be notified of new videos as they come on. So until next time, bye for now.