Using Notecards in Bookends

Here is how I use notecards in Bookends. I think it is more elegant than Zotero, but I haven't used Zotero for this feature as much, and if you want to post something about Zotero please let me know. I would love to see how to do this. There are a bunch of pictures here that may appear to make this more complicated than it actually is, but I wanted to document every mouse move (almost) just to show you exactly how to do it. So here we go.

What I have open here is Skim (a wonderful PDF reader) and TextEdit, just to take notes. The important thing to notice here is the format for the notes. Under the oval there is an @ plus the page number. The arrow points to the heading of the note, and the vertical line shows the body of the note. I think the titles are great because of how they are used later in the process, but they also help the scholar distill, what is so important about the note she just took. What is the significance of this quote?

After all the notes are taken in one single file in TextEdit (or any other RTF editor), it's time to transfer the notes to Bookends.

On the right, you see the complete set of my notes, I simply selected them all and dropped them into the notecard section on Bookends. Bookends will separate each note, and give its proper citation.

Here is what the notecards look like when they are imported into Bookends.

Next, I like to move the Notecards into DEVONthink Pro, because this is where I collect all of my research. To do that, I need to copy notecards and citations, left click on the notecards when all of them are selected and then select the appropriate option.

In DEVONthink, I just paste into to a rtf file.

Here, notice the funny format at the end of each note. This is the Bookends tag, that allows it to enter the proper citation. The next step for me on Bookends is to sort the notecards into the appropriate place in an outline. Where are the notes going to be referenced in my paper? Under what heading? Unfortunately, since this is just an essay on how to use notecards, I don't have a full paper on Creation to talk about, so I made up only two different folders to sort the text into.

In this screen, on the left you can see the two folders: Genre of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2:5. What I did was highlight each note and drag it into the appropriate folder. Now the note titles that I had made, function fantastically. They are used as the newly created notecard title in the appropriate folder. See below.

Beautiful! I know. In my own work flow, I usually import these notes into Scrivener to compose the paper, but because this is about Bookends and Notecards, I am going to skip ahead to the finishing steps.

In Mellel, you have to convert texts to citation. 

Thankfully, Bookends has done all the hard work for you. 

Here is what the text looks like after it is recognized as a citation.  

Now, the document is being scanned to convert the text to the proper format. 

Bookends does its part. 

And here is the final citation, in its final form with the proper page number referenced and everything. 

 This is my work flow, and why I said that Bookends handles notecards elegantly. There is another feature to Bookends that I don't use, it involves tiling the notecards in a hierarchical order, but I haven't figured out how to incorporate that into my work flow yet. Also, it wouldn't have worked for this example because I only used a twelve page article! So does Zotero do notecards like this? Or something similar? I would love to see your thoughts in the comments about this.