21COFH-Develop a Digital Organizational Scheme-Week 2

This week's project will lay the foundation for much of what we will be doing as 21st century organized family historians. There are 3 things we need to consider for this week's project. Your mission is to choose 1 or more tasks below as appropriate for your interest, situation, and available time:

1. We need to have an organizational plan for our hard drive.
2. Develop a naming format for our digital files.
3. In order to make it easier to find files, we should consider the use of "tags" or metadata.

I am not saying we should actually reorganize, rename and tag all of our files on our computer this week. Although if you wish to do so, go right ahead. There's no time like the present!

What I am saying is you should put some thought into how you are going to do these things going forward and develop a plan. If you write your plan down, that is even better because you will be more likely to remember and follow your plan.

Just remember, you need to come up with a plan that will work for you and that you will follow consistently! Keep it as simple as possible. It doesn't do any good to come up with a plan and then not follow it.

This is where our list of resources begins to come in handy:

• Number 19 - Dear Myrtle's Organizing Checklist for February under week 3 describes her file naming scheme.
• Number 20 will help you with your hard drive organization. In addition, Lisa Louise Cooke's article, "Organizing Your Hard Drive," in the May 2010 issue of Family Tree Magazine provides a written account of her podcast and UTube videos in listed in Number 20.

Additional resources:

• For photographs see Organizing Your Hard Drive: Photo Filing Tips.
• One of my all time favorite blog posts on naming files is a series at Ancestories:
• Tuesday's Tip: Organizing Your Digital Files.
• Update on Tuesday's Tip: Organizing Your Digital Files.
• Tuesday's Tip: Organizing Digital Research Notes, Emails, and Reports
• On the topic of tags and metadata, Moultrie Creek Gazette recently had a post titled, Let's talk tags which is informative.

You can complete this week's mission by leaving a comment or writing your own post and leaving the url to your post in the comments section. If you don't have a blog, keep your own journal!

Good luck!

Here are links to my project:

• 21COFH - Digital Organization Scheme - Part 1
• 21COFH - Digital Organization Scheme - Part 2

© 2011, copyright Michelle Goodrum