File Naming Conventions
During your time at UW Oshkosh, you will use your ePortfolio to collect, discuss and respond to many pieces of your work, such as research papers, essays, presentations, or audio and video clips. When the time comes to add a piece of work to your ePortfolio, how will you find and identify the correct file? One way to make sure you can easily locate specific pieces of your work is to adopt a file naming convention. If you use a consistent system (a convention) to name your files, you'll always be able to quickly find the one you need. Here are a few suggestions for developing your own file naming convention, and an example you can borrow!
Use Meaningful File Names
File names don't have to be short. Make them as long as they need to be to convey the information you need! If you name your file "EnglishPaper.doc", how do you know the subject of the paper, what course it's from, or if it's the draft or final version? A file name like "English202MaryShelleyPaperFinal.doc" gives you much more information about the contents of the document! Think about what information will be most meaningful to you when you're trying to retrieve your files -- will you need to find an item from a particular course number? Everything from your first semester? All of your work in a particular subject area? The answers to these questions will help you decide what to include in your file names.
As part of the ePortfolio process, you may revisit and revise past pieces of work, so it's also helpful to indicate in your file names if the item is a draft, original or revised version. You may decide to include terms like "draft" or "revision" in the file name, or use an abbreviation to indicate the version number, such as "v1," "v2," etc.
Some suggested components of file names include:
- Subject
- Course number
- Type of document (e.g. paper, group presentation, speech, annotated bibliography)
- Semester and/or year
- Revision number or rewrite status
Be Consistent
Including a lot of information in your file names will help you, but if you put that information in a different order in every file, your files will be jumbled when you try to sort them. Choose a pattern for naming your files and stick to it -- for example, if all of your file names start with the course name and number, you can easily sort your files to group all assignments from the same course or subject area together.
Example File Naming Convention
In this example, we use the following naming convention for our files:
Course_Assignment Details_Semester
Spanish113_Group Project_Fall2012
When files are named according to this convention, we can identify the subject area, course, type of assignment and semester at a glance. If we sort our files A-Z, they will naturally group themselves by subject area and specific course:
We can also search our files for a specific type of assignment or semester. If we search for Fall2012, all of our files from that semester will be retrieved.
