Month: April 2012

I obviously pick post titles based on what pops into my head.

This post likely has a limited audience. However, for those of us who do a certain kind of work, there is a constant quest to find a more efficient approach and I thought my experiences may be of interest to this limited audience.

Some of the work I do, researching and writing, depends to some extent on my ability to build on the work of others. The quality of my writing cannot be based solely on my own experiences. Writing textbooks requires that I do a good job of covering a lot of ground and to do this well it is important that I review and integrate what topic-specific experts can offer. Sometimes I do not think this is understood. The preparation time can  far greater than the writing time. Research requires a similar approach. The method used builds on or is designed to evaluate a method used by others.

Over the years, I have attacked this problem in different ways. Often, the approach was based on the technology available at the time. When I started, it was a combination of highlighting paper copies of journal articles and creating note cards. I would organize note cards by topics and when it was time to write, I would identify useful resources using these cards and then review the related original resource to get the specifics. At some point, the notecards were transitioned to some digital equivalent. Digital offers several advantages – there is no need to place one physical card in one location under one heading and digital content can be moved from program to another with less work when an upgrade was necessary. When you do this for 30 or so years you begin to understand that you must move on to newer systems even when the transitions take time to implement.

The most recent development has really been on the content delivery side. I still get a few journals, but as I sometimes explain to those who visit my office, the journals are just a decoration. I don’t get up from my desk to go search my shelves. I download pdfs of journal articles from the library. The library has far more diverse holdings (at least for journals) and the pdfs are digital. I also must admit I do not visit the library – they cannot purchase the books I need and the pdfs I can get online. The library to me is mostly the university commitment to purchase access to digital versions of the journals. I use tools to annotate and highlight the pdfs – my present tool of choice is Skim. The unique feature of Skim I like is the opportunity to export the notes I insert and the text I highlight (when the pdf is not locked). My process might be described as a multi-stage effort to boil down and integrate ideas. The thing about Skim I do not like is that the highlighting and annotating disappear if I should up the saved document in a different pdf reader. Evidently, there is no standard way to add personal information (highlighting and notes). This limitation exists even if I open the same pdf on a different computer using the same program (unless the pdf and highlights are saved as a pdf bundle). I am not certain how the personal information I add is stored when I do not create a pdf bundle.

I have been saving and tagging hundreds of pdfs on my office desktop machine using a program called Yep. I must admit I prefer older versions of Yep. The files in the older version of Yep were moved to a location I could identify. As I understand the new version, it finds pdfs where ever they happen to be. I suppose this is somehow more useful, but I get stuck in one way of doing things and resist change when what I do makes sense to me. Combining journal articles I am saving as pdfs with all pdfs on my computer creates a mess that I must then create a tag system to address (unless I read the manual and learn the other options available).

The problem with Yep is that I work from at least 4 differences devices – my office and home desktops, a laptop and a iPad. What I really want is a way to keep content in the cloud in a way that offers more than the accumulation of hundreds of files in a giant folder. I am presently exploring a service called Mendeley. Mendeley is primarily a social way to store citations and notes, but it also provides a way to store and access the pdfs associated with the citations across devices.

Screen capture of Mendeley markup window

Here is how I think about the disadvantages of Mendeley. The free version of Mendeley provides 1 gig of storage (500 mb of personal space). You should not be allowed to complain about the benefits of free. What I do not like is the cost for the lowest cost paid version. The first paid level offers 3.5 GB of personal space for $60 a year. A total commitment to this program on my part may require even more space. In defense of Mendeley, the various price points offer features beyond storage space. The citation lookup feature is nice when it works. However, if I am reading the article, the citation information is typically listed on the first page of the article and not a terrible problem to enter in the system. The system is designed for groups of users and some of these features would be of great benefit to research teams. Large graduate programs with many graduate students would be well served by such features. The free version of the program allows some sharing and this level if sufficient for my needs. When Box.net offers 50 gigs of storage at no cost (at least when I opened my account), $60 a year for 3.5 GB seems a lot. I also prefer Skim to the note taking and highlighting tools built in to Mendeley. I kind of have the same reaction to a paid account in DropBox. Here the first paid version is $100 a year. A combination of Skim and DropBox would be a great solution at $30-40.

I would like to think I am not cheap. I invest several hundred dollars each year in online services, but I still tend to think of these services as a luxury rather than a necessity. For me, it is really a matter of price point in relationship to how I see myself using the service. More features, mean higher price even if only a few of the features interest me. This is why I keep looking around and probably why companies offer different options of what seem similar services.

For a second opinion, here is a review from the Chronicle of Higher Education.