Advice on research software

Posted by Wayne K
Aug 16, 2013 at 09:46 PM

I appreciate the many excellent posts on this forum. I’m hoping to get some advice on how to handle an upcoming research project on the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

There is a huge amount of source material available on this topic. I’d like to create a database that will allow me to filter and sort the material in different ways. Text will be broken up into short sections so they can be easily re-arranged. Each text segment will have the usual basic fields (tags) such as author, title, date, etc. Each text segment could be assigned to dozens of topic fields.

I have several PIMs (Ecco Pro, Rightnote, Tree Projects, Cinta Notes etc). Maybe one would be appropriate for this job but I worry that they’re going to be overwhelmed by the volume of material (tens of thousands of records). What PIM would be up to a task like this or should I be looking at a database like Access?

I realize that what I’m asking has been covered in various ways on many different threads. I’m not asking for a rundown of all the software options. I’m stuck on the issue of PIM vs database and am hoping to avoid going down the wrong path and wasting time. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Wayne