Thing 9: Evernote - A Librarian's Best Friend?



Evernote's strapline is Remember Everything, hence the Elephant logo. It allows you to clip websites, tag them, add your own notes and store them for later consultation. You can also capture photos, screenshots, scanned documents etc., all of which are automatically indexed and are fully searchable. Sounds like a very useful tool indeed.

Initially I was rather disappointed though, the look and feel of Evernote isn't great. Although there isn't much to it, it's not that intuitive to use, none of the buttons tell you what they are for if you hover over them and the formatting of clipped pages can go astray. I also found myself annoyed with the fact that if you delete a note, tags that only apply to that note don't disappear. The ink notes are great fun though, even if your writing ends up like this...

All that aside, I can see it's potential, not so much at home, but definitely at work. Currently I add useful links to my favourites and have some notes scribbled on index cards, however it's often difficult to find things when I need them and my favourites list has become too unwieldy to browse. Being able to tag links, make notes and for it all to be searchable is a real coo. It's like having all your bits of information catalogued with metadata but in draft form.

Once up and running in work (if IT agree to install it on my machine) it will be really good to see all links/info that are stored using the same tag in one place. This should make it much easier to repackage information for our intranet.

With the way in which Evernote works, if anyone can make the most of it, it has to be Librarians. Now all I need to do is convince IT.