Knowledge Management & Research Tools: Evernote
Channel: Rich McCue
Date: 2012-12-04

While there are a number of software packages and services available, the market leader for general purpose web research assistant software is Evernote.# Evernote allows the user to capture digital content, including web pages, PDF files or snippets of web pages, organize them, annotate them, share them, publish them and search them. No more worrying about whether or not the web page being looked at will still be on-line next year (or next week). Content can also be captured on mobile devices like smart phones, and that data is automatically synchronized back to any computer that has Evernote installed on it. Mobile content can be text, as well as pictures and audio. Very helpfully, pictures of text are made key word search-able, so that you can take, for example, a photo of a white board, and Evernote will make the text search-able not only on your smart phone, but also on your computer. 

There are three ways to use Evernote. The first is via a web browser plug-in for Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer to copy web pages or parts of web pages. This is the way the author captures data most frequently.  When on a web page that needs to be saved, simply press the Evernote icon in the web browsers' tool bar. Evernote also captures the available meta data from web pages, including the original web address, author, keywords and capture date, so that this information can be used as needed for citations it in research documents. Additionally all the information in an Evernote account can be accessed through the Evernote web application.

Second, Evernote can capture data from mobile devices, including photos and text. Metadata for photos includes, date and geographic location of where the picture was taken. Note taking on tablets and smart phones is another popular use for the mobile program. Researchers can also search for any information in their Evernote database on their mobile devices.  Mobile versions of Evernote are available for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows 7 devices.#

Lastly, a feature rich Evernote desktop client is available for Windows and Mac computers (a third party program called NeverNote# is available for Linux). Markup (with the digital equivalent of a yellow highlighter) is available to annotate captured and locally stored web pages in Evernote. Researchers can add their own meta data to items in the form of tags, or they can put them in "notebooks" to help keep things organized.  This can be invaluable when looking at the document a year from now and having a hard time remembering why it was so important when captured. 

For more information, see this blog post: http://richmccue.com/2012/06/04/hot-off-the-ebook-press-research-collaboration-tools-for-students-staff-faculty-creating-a-modern-memex/