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This is a suggestion for the next version of OneNote:
When I am doing secondary research or simply working on learning a topic
I keep all my notes in OneNote. I create one big outline of everything I
have learned and copy and paste bits that I take from all of my different
sources and put them in the appropriate place in the outline.
Unfortunately, keeping track of where I got all those quotes is very
difficult in OneNote.
I propose that OneNote allow the insertion of additional metadata
attached to a paragraph which can contain the citation information. If
any part of that paragraph is copied and pasted then the citation should
be copied with it. To assist in adding this citation information an
additional task pane would be needed. All the citations entered so far
would be listed in this task pane with the list filtered to show
citations in this page, section, section group, notebook, or all
notebooks just the same as with the summary pane. The citations in this
list will have radio buttons next to them so that only one can be
selected as the "current" citation. Finally, whenever a user types or
pastes a paragraph into OneNote while one of these citations is
"current" the metadata for that citation will be entered as metadata for
that paragraph.
To make it easier to adjust the page numbers entered in the citation
metadata there could be a number box next to the citation. It could have
little up and down arrows to allow the user to either enter the correct
page number to use of just click to increment or decrement the number.
There would be a possibility of users forgetting the feature was turned
on and accidentally adding citations to every paragraph they wrote.
Therefore there would also need to be a toolbar button for enabling and
disabling this feature which is highlighted when enabled so the user
could always tell when the feature was on so they didn't accidentally
insert citations where they didn't belong. A notification in the status
bar that flashes every time a citation inserted as metadata would also
ensure that the user knew they were inserting citations. It might even be
best to only add citations when the citation pane is displayed.
Otherwise, there would be lots of complaints that users had entered
thousands of paragraphs with the most recent citation accidentally added.
This feature could even be integrated into Word so that any time text
with an attached citation were copied into Word a footnote or endnote
would automatically be created. I realize that there is a popular
program, called Endnote, which does something similar. I have tried that
program and it is awful. The only reason it is popular is that it works
at all and there is very little competition.
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I have been playing around with ways to do something similar using the
existing features of OneNote 2007. I tried entering citation information
as a hyperlink. Unfortunately, this cause odd errors and locked up
OneNote. So I guess the other option is to simply create a list of
citations on one page and then link to those citations using the
hyperlink feature. I'm thinking it would be best to just put the page
numbers in parentheses at the end of the quote and turn that into the
link to the citation. If one copied part of the paragraph they could then
just copy the page numbers in the parentheses which would copy the link
with it. It would also be easy to just copy the link text and edit the
numbers in the parentheses for quotes from different page numbers.
Now that I think of it, one could even create a dummy link right on the
same page with the citation. This dummy link would point to the citation
and could then be easily copied to wherever it was needed. This way you
will only need to create the link once.
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