Legal Research

Potential breakthrough in personal information management strategy

By Jason

Longtime readers of this blog might remember that one of my goals this year has been to come up with a comprehensive personal information management strategy, and to blog about it periodically. Towards that end I am currently reading the book Personal Information Management edited by William Jones and Jaime Teevan.

The book is fantastic, and I am going to post a more thorough review of it after I’ve finished reading it. As any good book will do, it has gotten me thinking about my own personal information management habits, and as always looking for solutions to managing my personal information.

Serendipitously, this very week, Robert Ambrogi blogged about a product called Evernote. Evernote is an application which allows users to store various types of information in a single location. I did not contact Ambrogi directly, but still managed to score an invite to the new Evernote beta (I have some invites available as well if someone out there would like to take a look). The great potential for Evernote is that there is a desktop product as well as the new web-based service. Supposedly these services will synchronize allowing you to install Evernote on multiple computers, synchronize with the web version and have all your notes available anywhere. Is this the solution I’ve been waiting for? Stay tuned to find out.

I think that my own information management might have to be task or project based. This is because I have some projects coming up which require me to create documents, collect emails, bookmark web pages, create calendar appointments, notes, and collect other information. Ideally I would like to attach all these information types to the project they’re associated with.

This desire has led me to take a much closer look at Personal Brain. A few years ago I managed to get a license key from a vendor at a conference, and tried out Personal Brain. At the time it didn’t really fit into how I was working. But my new desire to link information objects to tasks or projects has forced me to take another look, thinking that Personal Brain might be the best tool for that type of organization. I should note that there is a free version of Personal Brain that you can download if you’re interested in trying out this really interesting software.

On a somewhat related note I will one day have to blog about getting a little more out of vendors at conferences. At the SLA Leadership Summit in January I managed to get a free book from a bookseller who was at the bookseller’s convention at our hotel.

But I digress. I have also thought about trying our MindManager, or one of the free mind mapping packages available on the web. I might still try this, but I’m a little wary of mind mapping software. The examples of mind maps I’ve seen look to be a little more hierarchical, and I am not necessarily sure I want my information objects organized that way. This is one of the reasons I have some problems with just using a simple folder system like what’s available on Windows.

So that’s where I’m at right now, as always I will keep you updated with my progress.

Update:

Web Worker Daily also had a nice post this week about Evernote. WWD focused on Evernote’s ability to scan text in images. So if you upload an image that has text in it, later on you could find that image by searching for the text. This sounds fantastic, and I did notice the feature when I first logged into Evernote, but I haven’t had a chance to try it out with my own photos yet.

Full post as published by Jason the Content Librarian on March 28, 2008 (boomark / email).