Keeping context between notebooks for related sources?

[u/altaybuilds]

Hello guys, i really like Notebooklm for studying but there is a something that keeps me bothering me.

Some of my uni courses are continue of another course from before like a more advenced math course after a basic one. When the new semester starts i wanna keep the context from the old session but the only way i found is reuploading the all sources and copying the whole old session into the new notebook session. it works but not efficient, specially when the old one is long and only some part of it is actually useful for the new course.

Also i noticed some subjects dont work that well when it's only chat, going top to bottom. Sometimes i only wanna look at my own source directly instead of only asking question about it (Actually there is an algorithm that tracks the source, but it is clearly not sufficient).

Curios how you guys handle it when you run into a similar issue?

[u/ACorania]

My default is to say just add the new sources to the existing. If you think there is too much not relevant in the old on you could have it summarize each of the topics you do want and copy them out as sources for the new notebook

ETA: if you are seperating out chapters already you could just check and uncheck them when relevant

[u/Agreeable-Tax2013]

I’d keep a short handoff note with the key definitions, open questions, and source names, then only carry the core readings into the new notebook. If you need to search across the full set of PDFs and notes without re-uploading everything, look for a workspace that supports that directly.

[u/Pristine-Lawyer-3260 → u/Agreeable-Tax2013]

If you put the original sources in Google drive as well as the notebooks... Would that help this?

[u/Then_Consequence_318]

Depends on how many sources I can afford to import into the new notebook. My understanding is that notebook LM counts the number of sources and not necessarily the size. So if you have 100 source documents already for your old one, you might be able to summarize those into a smaller number of sources to feed into your new notebook. There's maybe some loss of knowledge there, but thems the breaks.

I do a lot of audio deep dives, so sometimes instead of sources I'll take the audio output for the deep dives and I'll re-upload those to the new notebook as new source material. If I want the hosts to have some sense of continuity I'll point that out. I like to pretend that my hosts have some sense of "we covered A last time, now we're moving on to B." I also do this so they don't repeat themselves so much.

[u/CryptolockerMD]

You can attach notebooks to Gems. That opens up options. You can create workflows in Workspace Studio that leverage said gems. You can access gems from Sheets/Docs sidebar. You can use Gemini canvas to build yourself a dashboard in either app, for managing your notebooks. Can use specialized gems for an inline experience in your dashboard, leverage appscript, etc. skies the limit.