Where should I keep track of my information?

There are many ways to keep track of your information, and which one you choose will depend on your personal preferences, as well as the amount of information that you have.

Where will you keep information about your resources

You may want to create a document to keep track of the important information about your resources. This ensures you have all the information in one place, including details about where you found it and how to locate it again.

Here's an example Research Tracker Template (Word DOCX, 23KB), but feel free to create your own!

You can also use the My Favourites features of Library Search to save relevant or important search results for later and add labels to sort them by unit or topic.

It is also a good idea to keep any notes you take in the same place. Find out more about notetaking strategies on the QUT HiQ Study page or use the QUT Notetaking Template (PDF, 63KB) to keep things organised.

Where will you keep the resources themselves?

Consider also where you keep the documents you have downloaded and/or your notes. You might create a folder for each semester, unit, and assessment item in your QUT OneDrive account or a personal Cloud service such as Dropbox. Set up a similar system for any web resources using browser bookmarks (YouTube video, 7min).

Assign meaningful names to any documents (for example PDFs of journal articles, reports, word templates) so that they make sense to YOU. The most important part of any system is that it is consistent and logical to the user. For example, many full text journal articles download with just a number, such as jdm88730_23217.pdf. Instead of saving it as the default, change the file name to include the author surname or article title and date you downloaded it.