Building a Digital Zettelkasten

At this point I’ve seen a couple of perspectives on building a Zettelkasten digitally, most using Roam research as a tool for building it. A couple of things I’ve noticed:

• Notes are taken on sources at first. Some approaches I’ve seen take these notes loosely in the daily notes as short blocks and then link the note in some way or another. Other approaches take the notes directly on a page dedicated for that source. I tend to prefer the latter approach as it yields a canonical place I know I can go to find all direct notes taken from that resource. I understand the idea of linking to the resource from within other notes (that’s the whole point of backlinks after all), but to me it feels a little odd to build the content that should be canonically in the page from outside the page. Backlinks are great for linking to related thoughts, ideas, concepts, etc, but I feel like it just makes sense to take notes inside of that page if they’re going to go somewhere.
• There’s a difference between literature notes and permanent notes. Literature notes come directly from a source, whereas permanent notes are in your own words and are more complete thoughts that stand on their own. These are considered the final form of the information absorbed during the literature note taking process.

Taking these (relatively simple) approaches into account, I think it makes sense to have the Zettelkasten subsystem as basically a collection of short notes that exist separately (but linked to any other system note). This is essentially so they aren’t interjected into canonical “feed” (literature) notes, stay separate from more formal wiki notes, and aren’t a daily note since we want them to stay separate and self-contained. The problem with having the notes as arbitrary blocks in a daily note is that there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to link to other daily blocks (they don’t exactly have a concise title). Additionally, as a list element, it doesn’t get the entire syntax treatment that a separate file would. I don’t know, this is kind of a touchy subject that could go either way.