Organizing Information Organizing Information
Organizing information as you locate and retrieve it: As you gather various kinds of information, keeping track of everything may be difficult. A little planning now may save you lots of hectic work later when you're under pressure from a deadline for a paper. Check out the list below for some helpful hints:
Plan for the variety of kinds of information you will need to keep track of: summaries, abstracts, downloads, printouts, citations, URLs, etc. Plan to use folders, envelopes, binders, as well as folders on your computer to keep track of information. Much of the information you may wish to keep may be copied and pasted into emails to yourself.
[OI1] For your email record: what kinds of information
will you collect? What kinds of "containers" will you need for it?
You can use "Favorites" (Internet
Explorer) or "Bookmarks" (Netscape) sections in your web browser to save the
locations you find useful. These sections allow you to add sites addresses to folders and
to create folders just as you save documents and create folders in your word processing
programs. 
Warning: If you bookmark sites on computers in one of the computer labs, the bookmarks will likely be gone the next time you try to access them.
When you locate a source you wish to use, capture whatever information is available for later use in citing your references. It is difficult with print texts, and sometimes impossible with electronic texts, to go back and find the specific information you will need to allow others to find the source of information you use. See sample MLA citations.
For books, find: author's name, title of publication, city of publication, publisher, year of publication.
For articles, find: author's name, title of publication, title of article, year/season/month/day of publication, volume number, and page numbers.
For electronic sources, look for: author's name, title of document, version of file number if applicable, access date, date of last revision, address, URL, access path, or directories.
If you photocopy a book section or an article, copy the sections of the book, magazine, or newspaper that contain the publication information you will need.