by Carlos Rodriguez
One of the most difficult things about doing research in the 21st century is keeping your information organized. Before the advent of the World Wide Web, organizing our research was relatively easy: we wrote our research information on index cards and kept copied articles in file cabinets. The Web complicated information organization by providing us with resources which could neither be placed in a file cabinet nor captured on an index card, such as web pages, and digital copies of PDF documents, videos, sound, and other files formats. Today, when I am doing research for an article or a presentation, I might do a database search and store the search results and any accompanying resources in RefWorks or EndNote Web. Next, I surf the Web searching for information on blogs or other types of websites. I use Delicious, the social bookmarking service, to bookmark and tag the sites for future use. Any information snippets or web page snapshots captured from the sites are placed in Zotero. Although Zotero is great for capturing web information, it is browser-based rather than web-based and restricts me to a computer and browser that has Zotero. If I have any random thoughts on the topic, they might be written on paper, saved online via Google Docs, or saved on my computer using Word. Finally, the presentation or article is written using Google Docs. As you can see, my dilemma is that since my research information is scattered over several products rather than in one program, accessing it is time-consuming and cumbersome. I need a digital file cabinet that will hold all or most of my information.
Recently, one of my colleagues introduced me to Evernote <http://www.evernote.com/>, a digital notebook that fulfills many of my needs. This program has some of the features of the products I just mentioned above . Evernote uses cloud computing to provide its service. In a cloud computing model, a service provider provides the application and holds the data, which the end user can freely access from anywhere. An example of a service cloud computing model is Google Docs. The Evernote cloud model not only takes advantage of this model to store data and perform tasks, but it also lets you work offline.
How does Evernote work?
Evernote uses the concept of notebooks; think of them as folders. First, you create a notebook, then you add, edit or create additional notes with your comments and tags. A “note” is the information you have stored in your notebook. The information in a note can be anything. Evernote will capture just about everything regardless of the information format, including web pages, PDFs, images, snippets of web pages, handwritten notes, or text documents. For instance, I created a notebook title “Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM)” and added a note about the purpose of the notebook. Next, I created a note, which contained an image of the evidence pyramid, added a comment and the tags: jpeg, pyramid, evidence, hierarchy, etc. Other notes contain PDFs of EBM topics, and snapshots of EBM websites. Did I mention that I added my handwritten notes from an EBM lecture that I attended? I took my handwritten notes, scanned them, and uploaded them into my EBM notebook. In addition to the handwritten notes, I can also add e-mails. Evernote provides you with an e-mail account. When you send an e-mail to your Evernote account that adds your sent e-mails to your default notebook as a note.
I have stored a lot of information in my EBM notebook. However, I often need to retrieve information quickly, but I have too many notes to search each one. How can I retrieve from my notebook the information I need? All I need to do is search my Evernote notebooks. Evernote will search the text in the notes as well as their tags. When I say it searches all text, I really mean it. Evernote utilizes Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology that enables it to search the handwritten notes as well as the text on images. For instance, I was looking for information on the levels of evidence so I entered “evidence” and “level” as my search terms. The search retrieved some of my handwritten notes, several articles, and a couple of images, which contained the phrase “level of evidence.”
What do you need to use Evernote?
Aside from going to the Evernote site and registering for an account, all you need is an operating system. Evernote is portable and runs on a variety of systems and devices. It runs on PCs, Macs, online and mobile devices. You can use the Evernote web application with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Google Chrome or the desktop program, which you can synchronize with the Evernote server. For mobile device users, Evernote will run on the iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Blackberry (Storm, Curve and Bold), and the Palm Pre and Pixi. Mobile devices also can be synchronized with the Evernote server. My colleague has used Evernote on her smart phone and she has been very pleased with it. She snapped a picture of a lamp she has been seeking, then synced it to the server and researched it later.
There are two pricing tiers for Evernote service: free and premium. The main difference between the two tiers is the added value you get with the premium service. For instance, the free service has a monthly upload allowance of 40MB instead of 500MB. File synchronization is restricted to images, audio, ink and PDFs, while the premium service has no file type limitations. The free tier has standard security features, but the premium has SSL encryption, which is more secure. If you have the free tier, advertisements will be displayed on your screen. The premium tier costs $5 per month or $45 per year.
I hope you have a chance to try Evernote. If you do, let me know what you think. Until NX Time C U on the Web.
Carlos
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