Iteratively review a resource - nominally a Note, but could be any kind. It's a text-oriented methodology, but could probably be applied to A/V materials as well.

I may possibly have modified this to play into Webcat's strengths.

Highlight key parts of the text, using a greater degree of emphasis each time you isolate the key within a key.

Once you're sure you have the pithiest snippets, create new resources of suitable types, and link them back to this source. Ideally, take the opportunity to rephrase them in your own terms, for a few reasons:

• This ensures you record the idea as concisely and accurately as you can, without the awkwardness that comes from a copy-pasted sentence fragment.
• Doing this has been shown to increase both comprehension and retention of information.
• Warm and fuzzy: it feels more like yours.
• If you're mining past projects for useful resources and one doesn't quite fit, now you can go back to the source and either re-distil it into a more generally-applicable form, or extract another interpretation that mutually enriches the existing one by contrast.

Within an Article, you might do this by copy-pasting the text into the body of it, and incrementally highlight that. Once you feel you have the quintessence, put that in the Summary attribute in your own phrasing.

Notes

• It's generally best to perform this process in the context of an active project, thus providing yourself with a tangible point of focus.
• This is very much a wheat/chaff exercise, so if you end up with more than you started, you did it wrong.
  • It's normal, and probably a good thing, to go through an initial expansion phase as you explore interpretations and ramifications. However, this must be followed by a filtering and selection phase.
• Versioned resources could be a real help here:
  • More confidence in trimming away the chaff, because you know it's easily recoverable if you decide some of it was wheat after all.
  • You can review the history of its various revisions, both to refresh yourself with some of the broader context, and to review your summarisation process in search of improvements.