Hey!
I've read a fair bit of history but I still haven't really found a good way to organize notes or really decide on what to note down. At some point I folded the pages where I found a good passage, but with some books that was almost every other page and it literally ruined the books, it also doesn't tell you what is where.
How do the historians of this subreddit go about it? Do you find an interesting/important piece of information and summarize it in your own words, do you write down the page number and paragraph and refer back to it? What has worked for you?
It depends a lot on what I'm reading for, but in general I keep my notes in Microsoft OneNote.
This time last year I was preparing for my PhD candidacy exams, so I was doing a lot of notetaking in which I had to very quickly figure out the basic argument and scope of a book or article, and then see how that argument fit in with other historians' arguments. I used these categories to ensure that I was looking for the same stuff in each reading:
For notes, I use a citation manager (Citavi, to be specific).
Notes are either direct quotations or summaries, depending on whether I find the original worth citing verbatim; also, my own comments (for example, when I find something worthy of critique, or whether I want to refer it in relation to some other research, etc.).
I can keyword every single note, I can group notes thematically...it eventually becomes necessary if you want to organize what you read not for single-time use but for reusability.
Also, I make simple, straight lines at the side of the text to indicate which paragraph or sentence(s) I think are important, and very short notes (keywords functioning as sub-headings, mostly) while reading to orient myself for later (its a bad idea to stop reading all the time in order to write down whole citations or the like: do it after every chapter or two).
The evaluation of where I make these markers - and what I end up transferring to my citation manager - is mostly decided by:
My own knowledge: there is no point in making notes about - usually factual - information that I already know anyway. Interpretations are more interesting, as is actually new information, such as someone's definition of a concept.
My interests: there is no need to make detailed notes about something I know I'll probably never write about myself. In such a case, I'll just write down something like "pg. 34-42 is about the history of Marxist feminism" just in case I might actually need it one day.
How well the author captures a certain idea in their own words: in other words, where they provide a sentence that is quotation material, despite not telling me something new.
I also use Endnote to manage my entire library, which is all over the place and just too big to keep track of otherwise. This approach works best for me: Endnote for the whole library and then Citavi to manage notes of the things I read.