Recently I’ve been tackling the big stacks of paper and overflowing files in my office. Most of these have obvious homes, either preexisting for for me to create. The things that keep stumping me, though, are the interesting articles I clip from the newspaper or magazines that “might be useful for a story someday.” These are about things like historical science experiments or the Pony Express or ecosystems.
I dutifully file them away, and then forget I have them and never look at them again. This is not ideal.
I figure I have three options: stop clipping articles and assume that if I need the information the Internet will find it for me later, scan them into Evernote and tag them, or file them and keep an index on the computer where I can easily search them.
Option 1 requires that it occurs to me to look up the information and that I remember I have it (and I have gotten more ruthless about what I clip). Option 2 requires wrestling with our printer/scanner to make thing legible. Option 3 is sounding like the way to go (probably keeping the index in Evernote, and then this can be easily converted to option 2 at some future point when I have a spare month).
This is surely an already-solved problem. Any better ideas than Evernote?
I don’t know if something like this would work for you:
http://www.citeulike.org/
http://www.zotero.org/
I have a feeling most of yours are not “academic” journals so it would involve some data entering. If they are online, you can install an add on to help.
Zotero looks interesting. I’m going to have to play around with it. Thanks!