Resources

During your genealogy research, you will work with a lot of resources. Resources means repositories, sources (books, magazines, photos, sounds, videos etc.) and citations of sources. Citations are text representations of sources or their parts that can be referenced from different places, e.g. you can create a citation for paragraph of book where specified person is mentioned and reference this citation from personal information for this person. This provides user with possibility to have information where the specified person is mentioned in documentation.

GenTle enables management of resources as shared data so you will need to create resources only once and you can reference citations created in all projects stored in depository.

Before you begin to model family trees and relations between persons, it is good to store all resources you have. GenTle enables you to create arbitrary structure of your resources. It means you can create any hierarchy you want but you need to follow several rules. Basic roots are repository roots. These roots represents libraries and archives; home or digital archives included. It is up to you to define meaning of your repositories. Repositories root contains source roots but cannot contain any citation root. Source roots can have arbitrary meaning and can be structured in detail since sources items can contain another sources items. In addition to this, any source can contain arbitrary count of citation items. Citation items are terminal items and cannot contain any other items.

How you can do this? Open Resources dialog (from menu or tool-bar). This dialog contains tree area with predefined root item called Repositories. Select this item and press Add button. Repository dialog appears. Here you can give name to you repository, specify its type, addresses, URLs, phone numbers etc. Last tab Changed enables you to specify changes done to this repository record. Whenever you change some data here, you can write a note who made this change, when and what it was the subject of this change. If you want to accept change you made, press Ok button on repository dialog and repository will appear in the tree view of Resources dialog. Repository is identified with ID since name (Caption) of repository is not obligate. Caption and other information about repository is displayed in the tree view as well.

To add source to specified repository, select this repository (or another source) in the tree view and press Add button. Source dialog will appear. You can enter information about source in the same way as you did it for repository. I will mention some tabs their meaning is not so implicit. Location tab is used to have an idea where is your source placed in resource hierarchy. It specifies repository and upper source (parent source) for specified source. You can use this tab to change location of specified source. To do so, press Select button and select parent source or repository. When moving source, it is moved with all underlying structure it contains.

Warning

Don't try drag and drop, it is not implemented yet. Changing location is the only way how to move already created sources.

Medium tab is useful whenever you want to associate some multimedia file with the source. For instance, you can have document in digital form you want to represent as source, digital copies of some books, videos or recorded voices etc. Use Select button to specify file name of a medium file for your you want to associate with your source. If format is supported for preview, the medium file will appear in the preview part of this tab. You can zoom it in or out. Formats containing graphics like jpeg, bmp, etc. are supported for preview. I plan to implement preview for sound and video as well but this is not a plan for near future. If you have a medium file that is not supported for preview, don't panic. You have still possibility to view it in external viewer. To do so, press View button. External viewer must be defined to use this functionality. You can do it via GenTle's setting dialog in section Viewers. You can define external viewers for any file type you want -- jpeg, bmp, tiff, ps, pdf, html, avi, mpeg, ogg, mp3, etc. etc. etc.

To add citation, select source where you want to create a citation and press Add Citation button. This button has no effect for repositories or another citations. Citation dialog appears. You can enter a lot of information for your citation. You can find there, among others things, Extract field where exact transcription of source or its part can be introduced. You can find Medium tab in this dialog as well. This is the same Medium tab as described above and contains the same medium file as its parent source. In better way, all citations of specified source reference the same medium file so you have simple access to this medium file when you write extract for your citation. You can change this medium file here but keep in mind that this change will be visible in parent source and all underlying citations. One example here: you can have a digital copy of one page of book of born children. You introduce this digital copy as source and create several citations, one citation for each child born. You want to see the same digital copy in each citation but you will cite different parts of it in every citation. But why not to create one citation for one source? Because for Josef Novak, you want to reference only citation related to Josef Novak and not for all children mentioned in your digital copy of born children book.

This is the way GenTle helps you to manage your resources. It is always a good starting point of your work. If you have new documents, add it to your resource structure so that you can have it ready whenever you need it.

Note

Note that when creating resources, different IDs are used. GenTle manages IDs automatically and unambiguously determines every entity. Another kind of IDs are used for repositories, another for sources or citations so you can determine from ID, what kind of entity you are dealing with. For instance, repository IDs begin with RP letters, sources with SR and citation IDs begin with CT letters. This approach is common in GenTle.