Snowball lets you quickly find and filter through papers using the snowballing method. Start with a core collection of papers, and find more by going through their citations and references.

Put it in the Extra field like this:original-date: 1864

German publishers send out so-called book cards to book shops along with their newreleases. On them, bibliographic information is printed. Those book cards are also in postcardsize, i.e. A6, and their textual structure allows for them to be included in the reference filebox.

How to write a thesis, by Umberto Eco. Eco is very heavily opinionated, in a brash and amusing way. Naturally, the writing is stellar. He also dedicates a lot of the book to the use of index cards for managing a bibliography, which was very pertinent at the time it was written. Even though the physical medium of index cards is no longer current and we are all busy fighting the Mendeley/Zotero/Endnote wars, there is still much to be learned from this book about effectively managing a bibliography.

Bibliographical notes which we extract from the literature, should be captured inside the card index. Books, articles, etc., which we have actually read, should be put on a separate slip with bibliographical information in a separate box.

I can refer to a section of page in a book by using #(booknr)p(pagenr)(section), for example #8p113a. There are four sections in my journals: A (upper left), B (down left), C (upper right), D (down right).

Humanists had the tools and even the concepts to invent the cross-referenced thematic library catalogue, but they did not do so. We do not know why it took several hundred years and the Italian director of the British Museum, Antonio Panizzi, to create a truly modern reference catalogue through his “Ninety-One Cataloguing Rules” in 1841.

Conrad Gesner, the German author of the founding work of modern bibliography, the boldly titled Bibliotheca Universalis, claimed to list all known extant books in learned languages (Greek, Hebrew, and Latin) of eighteen thousand indexed authors. While he complained of a “harmful abundance of books,” he nonetheless gained his fame by cataloguing them.

In effect, Too Much to Know is a reference book about reference books, containing chapters on early “information management,” note-taking, reference genres and “finding devices,” compiling, and the impact of reference books.

I’m resisting the temptation to add bibliographical cards into the Obsidian vault. Niklas Luhmann, you may recall, had a set of cards in his zettelkasten that were source citations. I don’t get the impression from reading his descriptions of his process or Schmidt’s research into it, that these were really an active part of the network of ideas in the boxes, which seem to have been based on his digested reactions to sources.

If the RRID is well-formed, and if the lookup found the right record, a human validator tags it a valid RRID — one that can now be associated mechanically with occurrences of the same resource in other contexts. If the RRID is not well-formed, or if the lookup fails to find the right record, a human validator tags the annotation as an exception and can discuss with others how to handle it. If an RRID is just missing, the validator notes that with another kind of exception tag.