Tools & Techniques for Archival Research
Tropy for Photo Management
Tropy is a free and open-source tool that allows you to organize and describe photographs of research materials. Like Zotero, it was developed at The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. If your plan is to take massive amounts of photos in the archives and need a way to view and organize them at home, this might be the tool for you
- Group your photos into documents
- Attach descriptive metadata, notes, or transcriptions to your photos
- Tag your photos however you want
- Search all of your information, notes, and tags
- Export your collections to JSON-LD or Omeka-S
Using Tropy & Zotero Together
Currently Tropy and Zotero do not talk to each other (but will in the future, although there is no current timeline). When you start to write, you will still have to figure out how cite your sources in your document. It is possible to use Zotero to cite primary sources, so you can create an item record in Zotero, or use a generic template for the archival collection and individually modify each citation. No matter what, you need to keep track of the following information:
- Repository
- Collection Number and Name
- Box
- Folder
- Individual document
Why Tropy?
- Researchers often come back from research trips overwhelmed by the amount of material with no way to organize it
- Zotero does not work well for mass photo storage for archival research (although there are other workarounds)