(From a workshop for Holy Cross faculty and staff held on February 16 and 17, 2011, in the Educational Technology Center of Dinand Library.)
An increasing number of digital tools are available to the scholar for use in discovering and managing research materials. These include Google Reader, Read It Later, Evernote, Dropbox, RefWorks, EndNote, and Zotero. All of these tools can be accessed from both desktop and mobile computers, allowing the researcher to find and organize materials into searchable databases accessible from anywhere (with a computer and Internet connection). The software and Web applications I describe here are by no means the only ones that will do the job. I simply present some of my own experience with a collection of software that I have found useful in organizing and managing information. Except for a couple of iPhone apps that cost a few dollars, practically all of the software described here is free.
Google Reader and News. All scholars know how time-consuming it can be to keep up with the literature in their particular field, not to mention just keeping up with what’s happening in the world at large. Google Reader and Google News can help you sip from the information firehose. Google News can be configured to display the categories of news that you are interested in. Google Reader is a type of aggregator that can display, among other things, citations of current journal, magazine, and newspaper articles via RSS feeds. Both of these tools are particularly useful when added to iGoogle, a home page that you can customize to display a wide range of information feeds. There is also a very good mobile version of iGoogle, from which you can link to all of the other Google tools. There are also apps specifically for newsreading that run on iPhone and other mobile devices. (I use an iPhone app called MobileRSS.)
Read It Later. But once you have established an information stream flowing onto your computer’s desktop day after day, how to deal with it? A tool that I have found to be indispensible for this task is Read It Later (RIL), an online reading list that you can access from any computer or mobile device. When you find an article or news item of interest on the Web, you click the RIL button on your browser, and the item is added to your reading list for later processing. My bibliographic research now consists of finding journal articles via Google Reader, Google Scholar, Twitter, or from one of the many databases provided by the Library, adding the ones of interest to Read It Later, and then deciding what to do with them when I, well, read them later.
Evernote. Evernote can be used to create an online database containing all of your text-based notes and associated materials such as Web pages and file attachments. This database can be accessed from any computer via a free account on Evernote’s Web site. There is also free Evernote desktop software that provides a slicker interface into your notes database than can be gotten from the Web site. Free Evernote apps are also available for iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and other mobile devices so that you can access your notes from anywhere on the planet (where you have an Internet connection or cell signal). The Evernote iPhone app lets you record voice notes and take photographs that can be added to the notes collection in addition to regular text notes. Best of all, these digital notes are fully searchable, something that simply cannot be done with the paper version.
Dropbox. Dropbox is a Web-based file repository, and has an array of powerful features that allow you to sync your files online and across all of your computers and mobile devices automatically. For example, I have a couple of writing projects that exist as a collection of Word files. I keep all of these files in my free Dropbox account, which gives me 2gb of free online storage (you can buy additional storage). By installing the free Dropbox software on my iPhone, work computer, and home computer, all of these files are automatically synchronized whenever I modify any of them from any of my devices. So if I’m on a train and suddenly have an idea, I can edit Word documents on my phone and the changes will (almost) instantaneously appear on all of my computers.
RefWorks, EndNote, Zotero. Articles that I save in Read It Later eventually end up in my personal bibliographic database for use as references in writing projects. I have used the desktop version of EndNote for years to maintain a growing literature database that currently holds over 5000 citations. There is a Web-based version of EndNote as well as a mobile app. RefWorks is a powerful Web-based reference manager that comes highly recommended by the Holy Cross Libraries (faculty, staff, and students can sign up for a free RefWorks account) and also has a decent mobile version. Zotero is a free, open-source reference manager that is widely used in the academic community. All of these applications help you to build a personal bibliographic database containing literature citations and supplementary files like PDFs of the full article. All can also be used with a word processor to insert citations and automatically produce formatted bibliographies. There are also tools for grabbing citation data directly off of Web pages. RefWorks, for example, has a tool called RefGrab-It for this purpose. Zotero, installed as a Firefox browser plug-in, also excels at pulling references off of Web pages. For a quick-start discussion of these various options for reference management, see this blog post.
