I've been using Diigo to create bookmarks for individual stories in full-texts books online, along with a few journals; I'll be working with journals more intensively later on, but for now my focus is on books. The books I am using are almost all public domain books, most of them published in 1923 or earlier, although a few are more recent publications for which the copyright was not renewed or which have a Creative Commons license, etc. Not all the stories are exactly stories (for example, I included a lot of rhymes from Thomas Talley's book of African-American rhymes), but the large majority of the links are, indeed, to full-text stories online.
I rely most on the great Hathi Trust online library because the URLs are really good for bookmarking: I can hack the URL to create multiple links to a single page for books that might have more than one story on a page. I've also made use of Sacred Texts Archive which has very nice individual URLs for each story in books republished there.
So, I've bookmarked the contents of 117 books so far, which you can see with the books hashtag #books.
If you click on the hashtag for a given book, you will see that book listing plus all the associated stories; for example, Smith's Amazon book:
As you'll see, the ordering is a bit chaotic; Diigo sorts either by date created or by date last updated, which means it is not like looking at the contents of a book. But that's okay: I see Diigo more as a search and discovery tool, not a presentation tool.
Projects. I've grouped all the books and their stories into some general inter-related projects I am working on: Joel Chandler Harris, Brer Rabbit (right now, those two categories are identical, but as I advance with the project, I'll remove non-rabbit stories by Harris and add rabbit stories from other sources), African-American stories, Caribbean stories, and African stories. After I finish bookmarking those areas (and I'm almost done), I'll start in on the Native American stories. I also have some Aesop stories I started bookmarking, and I'll be doing stories from India; both Aesop and Indian traditions like the Jatakas and Panchatantra are helpful to understanding the kinds of African animal stories I am most interested in.
Searching. The real power of Diigo comes from the ability to search both the text material in each bookmark (title and description) along with the tags. Not all story titles are helpful in identifying the contents, but they are a start! As I go through and add descriptive summaries to the stories along with tags, the searches will become more and more useful. Right now, I have descriptive material and tags for 600 stories, and I should get to 1000 by the end of the summer. I am using a search to help me zoom in on likely rabbit stories; here's a search that tells me stories with rabbit in the title for which I don't have a summary yet and which I have not tagged as an item to skip (for whatever reason): 93 stories, which I'll be able to get through in the next couple of weeks.
As for the stories I have actually tagged with rabbit: 253 stories! That is pretty exciting! My first book project is to create a Brer Rabbit book highlighting the connections between the rabbit stories of the Americas and the rabbit stories of Africa... I am going to have way more than enough materials to create that book, and Diigo is the tool that is going to help me search, research, and stitch that book together from available public domain materials. :-)
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