By Sierra Pawlak

During the November 27, 2024 TAA Conversation Circle, Janet Salmons, co-moderator and qualitative methodologist, shared an analogy of what she meant by the term “content curation” in the context of her work:

“If you go to an Art Museum, the curator doesn’t just hang all the stuff. They make sense of it. Like, ‘Oh, okay, here’s these George O’keefe paintings, and here are the Kachinas that were depicted in the painting,’ the artifacts and the history and the social context. So, I’m not just walking through a whole bunch of different pieces, but I’ve got something that’s making sense of it and looking for themes and pulling in other context that would help to build more meaning around it. That was the inspiration I had for using that term.”

If you want to group your work like an exhibit of fine art, where do you begin? How do you sort through your old work to decide what to include and what fits together?

Salmons recommended organizing your work as soon as possible. The sooner you start, she said, the less time and work you will have to put in later when you have as vast of an amount of previous work that she does: “I know that I’m guilty of trying to get through [a project] because I’ve got another project that I want to do when I’m done with this one, and not tying up the loose end. That’s a lesson I’ve learned from, and now I try to categorize things.”

“As you think about a piece of work that you’ve done, you’re saying, ‘Okay, I’m finished with that. I’ve got the notes that I wrote. I’ve got all of this stuff. How am I going to put this together in a way that I’ll be able to find it again without having to do laborious searching through every folder to find it?’ which, unfortunately, does happen,” said Salmons. A specific way she bypasses this issue, she said, is using techniques used in qualitative data analysis, such as coding things. “If I’m thinking about the folders I have on my hard drive, I’m often saving the same thing in more than one folder. I’m thinking of the folders as, say, the category, and then within that, the subfolders would be like the codes.” For example, she said that a project may fit into one folder, but it also may fit into the figures folder and the examples folder, so whatever direction she’s looking for it, she can find it. “I’ve tried to code as I go,” she said. “And to the extent that I did that over the years, it was certainly helpful.” Salmons said that with one project, she needed to go through original manuscripts of her books, and different iterations of the figures that she’d used, and she was glad she had a folder that was just figures.

She recommends bibliographic reference managers Endnote and Zotero: “The new versions of [Endnote and Zotero] allow you to tag, and boy, did I wish I had done that years ago, because I have thousands of references. I can search in the reference database by title, but if I had tagged it by the project name, the title of the book it was in, and the project it was associated with, that would have been helpful.”

In terms of where and how to save your project files, Salmons warns to be careful. “Someone emailed me that they had all these things published on a platform that abruptly went out of business, or was acquired, and they aren’t there anymore,” she said. “They gave no notice, and all this person’s work on this platform was just gone. They were glad they saved copies of things.” Salmons also said to be careful of software changes and save accordingly. Think about the format you save figures and documents and in addition to saving with the proprietary software, save in a format that might be accessible even if that software is no longer available. For example, a figure created in Visio can be saved in the proprietary .vsd format, but can also be exported to Scalable Vector Graphics or jpg. “If I can dig up things that I did in my master’s degree, if I could find the files, could I even open them with the software we have today? How do you save stuff? I went into my file cabinet and actually found a print copy, and I thought, ‘Oh, I’m glad I’ve got a print copy!’ But you have to get a whole nother house just to save everything if you printed everything out.” Still, it is worth it to have a print copy of major pieces of work you might want to revisit in the future.

If you’d like to learn more about organizing your body of work and content curation, you can watch the November 2024 Conversation Circle, and watch Salmons’ webinar on the same topic.