Somehow, I cannot make up my mind on how I shall best use media in sources and citations. As our greater family is spread across several continents, we strive to have complete digital copies of any source material for easier sharing – for example the entire digitized church book or a complete book of our own library scanned as PDF.
I created a source in RM9 for each of these works, and I added a media entry pointing to our own digital copy. Doing so, the source list in RM is the catalog of our digital archive. When such a source is cited in an event/person, the media points to the entire multi page file of the source, regardless of the page number specified in the citation. To have the relevant original close by in the citation, I found no other way than to add another media of the same source with just the relevant snippet. Creating all these snippets is quite laborious and leads to duplication and a bloated media collection.
I would highly appreciate any advice, ideas or hints to concepts or features I might have missed in relation to sources, citations and media usage in RM!
Thanks!
By the way, we are not syncing to/from any online service like FamilySearch or Ancestry.
I would do the same as you, except I wouldn’t bother with the media snippet attached to the citation.
I’d say you’re doing the right thing by attaching the full scanned document to the source and then just referencing it in the citation.
You may want to also cite an approximate line number to make it easier on the reader to find the data.
This reference has a way of doing it using acrobat as the pdf reader. Don’t know if it works with other readers.-
I would add the media link to the book on the Source level. Then enter a transcript of that part of the book into the Research Notes on the Citation level.
Thank you for bringing that up - I already went down a similar road but did not mention it to keep the post short. I tried to use deep links with a fragment identifier (e.g. file:///foo.pdf#page=42). That type of link works perfectly on Windows if the default application for PDF is set to a web browser. However, in RM the fragment gets lost when opening the link, and while the correct PDF opens, it does so on the first page. Additionally, I could not get relative links to work neither as static links would dictate a quite inflexible way of local data storage.
To be honest, I did not debug the issues outlined above for too long, as it seemed not to be a good solution anyways and I could still revisit later if needed.
However, as it looks now, I am tempted to go with media on the sources and transcripts on the citations.
I have a few PDF files that reflect entire books. They are great for sharing with other researchers, but I don’t link them into Sources in RM. Instead, I extract individual pages to link into Citations in RM. That seems consistent with the idea that I don’t have PDF copies of things like complete census books and complete courthouse marriage books. All I have for them is images of individual pages. But I do understand the logic of what you all are doing with the complete PDF books.