Another in
the series on sessions I attended at the NGS 2014 Family History Conference.
T210 (R) Adding Evernote to Your Genealogy Toolbox, Julie Miller,
CG, Syllabus page 143
Whereas I
immediately fell in love with Dropbox the first time I played with it, I have
had a more love/hate relationship with Evernote. I had
downloaded it to my laptop, I had installed the free Web clipper in Google
Chrome and then I stalled ... Everyone says what a great program it is and how
they can’t live without it. I, on the
other hand, hadn’t figured out how to live with it and living without it was
working out just fine.
I am
partially to blame for that, I never did fully “Explore Evernote in Five Steps”
as the software implores me to do. Even
if I had done that, and learned how to create a note and notebook, etc, what I
hadn’t really appreciated were some of the following:
1. The use
of stacks! Notes and notebooks did not
provide me with enough organizational levels to handle client projects along
with personal needs. Once I learned
about stacks from Julie, for the first time I could now think of how I could organize
the information to suit my needs – with a bit of a hierarchy.
2. The
value of tags.
3. Web
Clipper. Though this was discussed and I
could appreciate its value (once I determined on my own that when you do “clip”
something from the web, you will get the URL, title and a date stamp (the
basics needed to cite the found information as a source)), my attention was
really caught when Lisa Louise Cooke (T219) mentioned that newspaper articles
that are clipped this way get OCR’d and become searchable. Ah ha – being able
to clip newspaper articles/pages and be able to search on them has great appeal
to me.
I have now
committed to myself (and publicly to you via this blog post) that I will make a
concerted effort to make Evernote a tool in my genealogy research arsenal. Besides the benefit of acquiring online
information with source information attached (and that you can do real time
annotations, note taking, etc), I can now also visualize how it will help me as
I explore finding aids for offline material – in a few steps I can save a
finding aid as a note, write notes on what project it’s for, mark-up the
finding aid to highlight what I need to request, and then visit the repository
with electronic notes in hand!
The
associated syllabus pages give you a nice overview of why genealogists should
consider using Evernote, how to get started with it and some of the neat and
useful features of it.
Editor’s Note: This series is not
presented in any particular order.
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