MANAGING RESEARCH ASSETS
Find these links and more information at http://bit.ly/manageresearch.
PRESERVING YOUR DIGITAL ASSETS
The Library of Congress offers guidelines for preserving digital material,
including photographs, audio, video, email, digital records, and websites.
See http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/you/
For a more technical and specific discussion of digital formats, see the Library ofCongress’s “Sustainability of Digital Formats”:
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/
In general, you should:• Identify: Make an audit of what you have.
• Decide which of your assets you want to keep and which you don’t need.
• Organize your assets: Give them descriptive filenames, organize theminto a logical file structure, and write down your organizational scheme.
• Make copies. It’s a good idea to have copies in a number of locations.
Every few years, check your copies to see if you need to export them to anewer format.
DEVELOPING A DIGITAL RESEARCH WORKFLOW
There’s no “right” research workflow. The practice that makes sense for you will
depend on your own research habits and the kinds of material you work with.
As you investigate tools, think about:• Capturing. Do you do most of your research online, in an archive, or at
the library? You’ll need a tool (or tools) that’s appropriate for the way you
really work and easily captures the data you need in a format that’spreservable — and preferably in a way that’s organized.
• Metadata. Few things are more frustrating than locating just theinformation you need but not being able to determine its origin. That’s
why it’s important to think about how you’re capturing information about
each asset you gather, like its source and its importance to your research.
• Searching and retrieving. None of this does you any good if you can’t getyour hands on the data you need when you need it. Metadata will help
you find the right stuff, but you may also want to think about tools forOCR (optical character recognition) and for “fuzzy” searching.
You should also be thinking about whether and how you can export your data.
That may seem boring now, but it won’t when the tool you’re using becomesobsolete!

MIRIAM POSNER | MANAGING RESEARCH ASSETSTOOLS TO CONSIDER
Backup Tools
Yes, you need to be doing this. Why are you not doing this? Do it right now! Think about
whether you want to store your backup on a hard drive or in the cloud — or both!
• Time Machine (Mac, already installed on your computer, automaticallybacks up your data to a hard drive at scheduled intervals)• Windows Backup and Restore (Windows, already installed on yourcomputer, backs up your data to a hard drive at scheduled intervals)• Mozy (Mac and Windows, $5.99/month, backs up your data remotely atscheduled intervals)• BackBlaze (Mac and Windows, $5/month, backs up your data remotely atscheduled intervals)• SpiderOak (Mac and Windows, free or $100/year, backs up your dataremotely)• DropBox (Mac and Windows, free or $10–$20/month, backs up your data
remotely)
Bibliographic Management
There are a lot of good options out there for saving, sorting, and citing your sources. The
key point is that you really should be using some kind of bibliographic management
system. You’ll regret it if you don’t.
• Zotero (Mac and Windows, free)• EndNote (Mac and Windows, $249.95)• Mendeley (Mac, Windows, and Linux, free)• Sente (Mac, $89.95)• Bookends (Mac, $69)
File Renaming and OrganizationIf, for example, you take a lot of photos in an archive, you probably come home with tonsof files with totally unintelligible names. Several tools can help you organize these assets
and give them human-readable names.
• NameDropper (Windows, $10, batch renamer that allows you to setpatterns)• Belvedere (Windows, free, allows you to set rules to rename and organizefiles)• Hazel (Mac, $21.95, allows you to set rules to rename and organize files)• Automator (Mac, already installed on your computer, allows you toperform many actions on your files)“Everything Buckets”
Depending on how you work, you may find it important to grab and tag things — fromthe Internet or from “real life” — quickly and easily. There are some very good tools forthis. Be careful, though: It’s not enough to grab something. You have to be able to find it
again, too!

MIRIAM POSNER | MANAGING RESEARCH ASSETS•••••EverNote (Windows, Mac, Android, and iPhone; free or $45/year;
captures and tags Web pages, photos, and other documents)
Yojimbo (Mac and iPhone, $38.99, capture and tag notes and documents)
Voodoo Pad (Mac and iPhone, $39.96, capture and tag notes anddocuments)
SOHO Notes (Mac and iPhone; $39.99; capture, tag, and organize notes
and documents and create custom forms)
DEVONthink (Mac and iPhone; $49.95; indexes your files, allows you toorganize them and add notes and metadata, offers “fuzzy” searching)

Databases
An “everything bucket” is a database, of course, but sometimes you need a tool thatstructures your data, too. Structure is great, but you should also be honest with yourself
about whether the tool will fit easily into your workflow.
• askSam (Windows, $149.95, designed to make database-creation quickand easy)• Microsoft Access (Mac and Windows, $139.99)• FileMaker Pro (Windows, $179.00)• Bento (Mac, $49.00)
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Your sources become much more findable when your run OCR on them. Of course,
depending on the kinds of sources you gather, OCR may be imperfect (or impossible).
• ABYY FineReader (Windows and Mac, $49.99 and $99.99, respectively)• Adobe Acrobat Pro (Windows and Mac, $404.10)• OCRopus (Mac and Linux, free)• EverNote (see above; EverNote automatically performs OCR on yourdocuments)• DEVONthink (see above; DEVONthink automatically performs OCR onyour documents)

MIRIAM POSNER | MANAGING RESEARCH ASSETS