I’m in a pretty good rhythm with my notes now (inspired by Odysseas on youtube), and I’ve got one area for raw notes I type up from books, lectures, etc. - and another for evergreen notes distilled out from those raw notes. So far so good.
My question is - for a lot of my note-taking, I’ve got source documents that I’m taking notes from (like handouts from a professor). They’d be useful to have on hand and efficiently be able to search through as sometimes my notes remind me of something, but I need to go to the source to get the actual quote - but on the other hand, I’m not sure if these belong in Obsidian. When I work in Obsidian, I’m mainly trying to craft my own notes, and form connections between them, and don’t really want source documents popping up on the graph, in link selections, etc.
My question is - does anyone else archive documents they take notes from to be able to reference later, and if so, how? In Obsidian and maybe just in a folder set to be excluded from other views? Or is there some other handy local file management system that can work well in tandem with Obsidian?
I use the PARA method and have a Resource folder in Obsidian which has these types of documents, which I also link to from my note for easy access. I’ve not really thought about how that impacts the graph view - I think you could filter it out? But ultimately, it’s just a folder in your file system anyway - it’s just that this way you can access it from within obsidian. Another route may be to just keep them archived in a (separate) folder in your file system which you could link to from within the note if useful?
In my opinion, source documents (and other large collections of things I didn’t make) belong outside of the vault in their own management system (which could be a dedicated app, another vault, or just a folder). (As you can see I haven’t set mine up yet. On my prior computer, before Obsidian, I used a folder, and before that I used Calibre, which I may try again now that I have a faster computer.)
That’s the sense that I had, thanks for validating it. Early on I just dumped absolutely everything into Obsidian, and now it just feels like a lot of noise whenever I’m trying to search or make connections among my own thoughts, and all these random files start coming up. I’d rather Obsidian be for my thoughts and summaries about those files.
Calibre’s a good idea! I have it just set up for my normal ebooks now, and calibre-web to be accessible on my home server - so if I took that route, I could also just link to relevant texts on my server from Obsidian notes.