Mastering the chaos of source notes

Too much information in too many places. A digital garden must be tended to like a real garden and piles of rubbish will accrue if you are not careful.

I’m faced with 63 unprocessed article notes from Omnivore,¹ plus 43 already marked as processed Literature notes, each with an indeterminable status.² I know there are notes from my Kindle Scribe not yet even looked at. I’m completely ignoring the 329 old blog posts I’m still to review and integrate.

The problems

The signs are obvious. I’m collecting faster than I can ingest and my time is spent filing instead of developing new knowledge. I archive articles only when I have made a note and Omnivore will only sync archived articles to Obsidian.

• I want filenames standardised to Surname (year), Title. I also want standardised properties of datetime, title, author, and publication year for indexing and search.
  • Omnivore sync is reasonable at parsing the information into the format I want. Substack subscription items are emailed in (🤷) and there is less structured information for Omnivore to work with.
• Notes are headlined “Literature Notes”
  • I’ve defined a Literature note as a type of Permanent note. Notes coming from Omnivore are often anything but permanent. Their DNA is truthfully that of Fleeting notes.
  • Tagging Literature notes is of unknown value.
  • Tagging Fleeting notes does not occur, but may help with new article processing.
• Sources and Literature notes are treated as equivalent.
  • The Sieler (2003), Coaching to the Human Soul (Volume I) note is both source and literature note. Don’t duplicate public knowledge means I don’t create a book page to track the author of a book. It’s easy to see how notes end up on the book page.
  • Omnivore synced articles differ. The “book” information, content and notes all come into the same page.
  • I want to reference sources consistently. I won’t always give away my personal notes. Way of Being references directly into the literature notes on Sieler (2003), Coaching to the Human Soul (Volume I).

The solutions

• Create A template to rename a source note from it’s properties.
  • Time is saved correcting note titles manually for consistency.
• Update Omnivores input template to say “Fleeting notes” instead of “Literature notes”
• Never publish sources. As long as I never publish a source page, the reference makes sense to everyone, and I can link/backlink³ privately and safely. I can enforce this with the Auto Note Mover plugin. It files based on tag and will move back into safety any sources I accidentally expose.⁴

Footnotes

1. +/Omnivore folder. The Omnivore plugin downloads to here. ↩

2. Atlas/Sources folder. ↩

3. Don’t forget Backlinks are important ↩

4. Quartz publishes notes on the website, but only when the are in the Quartz subfolder in Obsidian. If all sources remain in Atlas/sources they will never be published. I will be disciplined to add the #class/source tag to each of them. Auto Note Mover will monitor for that tag, and when detected, move any note, anywhere, back to the Atlas/sources folder. See Organising digital knowledge across multiple systems for more on this riveting topic. ↩