Hello,
I’m hoping to get some feedback about a project I’m working on. Is my proposed approach sound, or are there pitfalls I’m missing?
I’m creating a database in DT Pro to collect journal entries by historic figures relating to a American Revolutionary War fortification site here in the state of Vermont so that I can build a timeline and “diary” of the site. I have access to about a dozen sources. These sources are mostly in the form of journals, but there are also correspondence and military reports. (For clarity purposes, I’m using the term “entry” here to describe a single item relating to a single day – that is, if one of my sources writes a three sentence description for 12 October 1776 that’s an entry; if another source writes a two-page letter on 5 December 1776, that’s an entry.)
My plan is to create one document per day (there will be about 15 months worth of documents) and to clip any entries relating to that day into that one document. So each of my documents may have as many as five or six related entries from various sources, though most will have two to four entries, I think. I will group these entries by month just to keep it tidy and manageable. I will use tags to mark each document with topics of interest covered in the entries–e.g. weather, living conditions, troop movement–so that I can group these as needed. I will also have a group to track the sources.
I have chosen this approach rather than creating a document for each individual entry because I want to be able to easily read all entries related to a specific day and this seems the best way to do that.
Am I missing some other approach that should be obvious? Any feedback is welcome.
Thank you.
Steve