T21M1 Management

Organizing Potential Chaos

As you proceed through courses like this, we expect that you will find lots of links to useful material that you will want to use or refer to later. How do you manage all this so you can find something in 6 months when you want to make use of it? Some people print it all and end up using a lot of paper and toner. This is not the ideal, because it is wasteful and the cost can accumulate. Some people like to bookmark such links and end up with a huge list of bookmarks. They can be organized into categories to help with retrieval, but you may find a way that suits you better by examining the following table.

Method	+	-
1. Print them	Minimal effort initially	Wasteful Not environmentally friendly Cost can accumulate Can easily be lost Not searchable
2. Add to favorites/bookmarks in your browser	Minimal effort initially	Lists can get very long Not searchable
3. Use a social bookmarking tool such as Diigo, or Zotero. If you are not familiar with social bookmarking, watch this short video.	Can be shared with others Can get the benefit of other people's research	Need to setup an account and be careful with security. Check out the Wikipedia entry on social bookmarking and note the risk of spamming.
4. Create a list of links in a Word document. You might use a table with columns such as title, topic, link and comments	Searchable Can add your own comments for future reference Can keep track of any useful material – not just web sites Easy to backup up with your documents	Need to setup the document
5. Combination	Choose to suit your own preferences	Not all in the one place

Dead Links

Everyone has had the experience of looking for a website only to find the URL or link you are given does not work any more. The Way Back Machine, the web archive, may be able help you out of this dilemma. 

With the web archive, you can see what websites looked like in the past. For example, here is what the Andrews University website looked like in October 1997.