Saving articles from current news

Today I've read an article about the restoration of the Smyth chapel in West Terrace cemetery, Adelaide. This chapel was established as a memorial to John Smyth, the brother of one of my great grandfathers.
While it remains available online it can be read at the home of The Southern Cross newspaper under this title Major restoration of historic West Terrace funeral chapel.

Online articles often disappear quickly or can only be found in subscription archives after their expiry date. To keep this article for my family history records, I prefer to have it stripped of all advertising.

On this website there is the handy option of Print article which strips the advertising but retains the reference details of the date and page of publication. My preference is to Print to PDF then save to an appropriate folder on my computer and to my Smyth family notebook in Evernote.

Print Options

In the Print Options the choices depend on the programs installed on the computer. From the Destination drop down menu in the Print dialog choose More to reveal all the options available

Print options

Web clippers

If you have the Evernote clipper installed in your browser, one option provided is to Save the simplified article to the notebook of your choice. This also eliminates all the advertising.

Using the Evernote web clipper - simplified article

Another option from the Evernote web clipper is to take a screenshot. This provides the user with annotation tools. This is useful if saving articles from local papers that are published via issuu.com where printing and saving is usually disabled.

Using the Evernote Screen clipper - use the annotation tools to add source details

Similar options are available through Awesome Screenshot and OneNote. These add ons are available for most browsers and both Windows and Mac operating systems.

This post first appeared on https://carmelgalvin.info

Tidying up Evernote tags

 If you have been using Evernote for any period of time it is possible that you have "ghost tags" in your database. These are tags that are not used by any of your notes. They may have been created for notes that you have now deleted or they may have come from a shared notebook which you no longer access.

Here's a quick method to clean up your tags. Open the desktop version of Evernote on your PC or Mac and scroll to the bottom of the side bar to select tags to view. All the tags you have used will be displayed along with the number of times that tag has been used.

Use CTRL or CMD to select all the tags with (0) next to them. These are the unused tags.

Simply right click and select Delete. Goodbye ghost tags.

This post first appeared on http://librarycurrants.blogspot.com/2015/11/tidying-up-evernote-tags.html

Trove Tuesday - a new life for lists

Evernote to the rescue

In the course of my family research I have compiled a number of surname lists in Trove and while these are very useful for revisiting events, there is no way in Trove to search within each list to locate either a person, date or event.

As I have created lists within Trove, I have corrected the OCR then copied the corrected text from the newspaper article into the Note field for each item on my list. This means I have the full text without needing to search for it again when I want to build a family timeline or write a blog post. At this stage there is no method of exporting lists from Trove so that they can be modified and searched.

Enter my good friend Evernote. Why did this not occur to me earlier? I've used the web clipper in many other contexts but never thought to use it for lists. Individual items in Trove can be saved in a variety of formats but for lists the only current option is pdf.
Using the web clipper I've chosen Simplified article and saved. Now my entire list is searchable and able to be edited in Evernote. If I update the list in Trove, I can simply repeat the process and delete the earlier note.

So when I search in Evernote for "bridget galvin"  her name is highlighted within the Galvin list. The link back to the list in Trove is active as are all the individual links embedded in the list. All the source citations are embedded too.

Similarly, I can search using a particular year, e.g 1907, if I want to locate all the events that were published in that year. Some lists I have on Trove are private. Now they are in Evernote, there is no need for me to log in to Trove again to retrieve information from those private lists.
Trove and Evernote, a great combination.

This post first appeared on https://librarycurrants.blogspot.com

Evernote for conferences

Advance preparation for conferences

A simple method to avoid carrying excess paperwork when attending a conference and trying to keep track of sessions, is to centralise any conference administration, notes and papers into Evernote. To this end I download the conference program, save it to Evernote then mark and annotate the sessions I want to attend.

To keep my memories and notes of the event all in one place, I set up some basic templates that I can use again and again. There are templates for individual sessions and for days of the conference as well as a general overall note to help me focus on information I may wish to collect and remember.  Each template is tagged with a tag individual to the conference to be attended.

The general and the individual day templates are in the form of lists and remind me to add photos, contacts and a variety of other materials at the end of each day. This way I can keep track of the who, what, where and when  - particularly with photos or tips and tricks garnered along the way.

The individual session template has the room, location and time, title of session along with the speaker's abstract. I then type my notes from that session directly into Evernote on my ipad while listening to and watching the speaker and their presentation. My handwriting is poor and I find keeping notes on a tablet quick and easy. Any handout given can be scanned to the notebook, I then incorporate it into my session notes so that the material is kept together.

The notebook also contains a guide to using maps to determine travel times to various venues.
An Index is provided for the notebook and individual note links can be added to this as the templates are duplicated and renamed for the days and individual sessions. Using this method one can leave a conference with notes organised and centralised for later review.

My shared notebook for AFFHO Congress 2015  to be held in Canberra at the end of this month, can be viewed and/or saved to your Evernote.
Notes are all tagged AFFHO as are my travel, accomodation and transport details all saved into my version of the notebook. AFFHO is also the tag to use if you are tweeting during Congress.
This notebook can be adapted for any conference that you may attend. I hope you find it useful. What else would you add to a Conference Notebook?


This post first appeared on http://librarycurrants.blogspot.com/2015/03/evernote-for-conferences.html

Easy into Evernote

New options for Evernote in iOS8

Now it is even easier to add web content to Evernote from Safari mobile browser. In the Send to Menu shown below, new options appear, one of which includes Evernote.

To turn it on select More

Switch on the services you wish to use then drag to change the order in which they appear.

Now there are several choices for adding information into Evernote on iPad and iPhone

1. Send to - using email to your Evernote address

2. Clip to Evernote - using the Evernote bookmarklet 

3. The new service as above, this also works in the Photos app or any app that has the Send to facility.

Quick access to Evernote can also be switched on in Notifications.

This post first appeared on http://librarycurrants.blogspot.com/2014/09/easy-into-evernote.html

Just note it!

Notoriously yours

Tired of those scraps of paper around the house? Collect all your notes together so that they are easy to find and search.Your tablet or phone usually has a note or memo app installed. On iPads and iPhones it is just called Notes. On Samsung devices SNote is installed and on other Android devices you may have Google Keep or one of a dozen other note-taking apps.

My favourite note-taking app is Evernote and I use this on my phone, my laptop and my ipad. At a glance I can see and search for any notes I've made no matter which device I am using. By adding titles and tags to my notes that makes it even easier to locate my information. All good note apps have search built in so that any word within a note can be found.

Here's some ideas for things you may like to keep notes for, so that you always have them handy.

Household

• Shopping lists - with favourite brand names
• Names, models and serial numbers of electrical appliances
• Car/cat/dog or any other registration number
• Size of room, space or cupboard
• Recipes or lists of ingredients

Personal

• Clothing and shoe sizes and brands for self and others
• Optometrist
• Dental
• Medical
• Names of any prescription drugs you take

Out and about

• Meeting notes
• Titles of books to read
• Music to acquire
• Films to see
• Places to go
• Price comparisons of intended purchases
• Travel notes

Some notes will be permanent and others ephemeral. Notes can be edited, altered, deleted to suit. Experiment with the note-taking app on your device to find the best way to use it to suit your needs.

Food and recipes

Organise those recipes

I've been steadily getting rid of all those scraps of paper saved from magazines that had a recipe I just could not resist. In the process I investigated a variety of ways of digitising those resources.
My process is quite simple.

1. Use Evernote - create a notebook for recipes
2. Scan those pieces of paper using the phone or tablet
3. Add tags
4. View cook book in Evernote food - not at all necessary as Evernote does such a good job, but the Evernote food app is visually pleasing.

The power of Evernote search is the winner for me, it even searches the text within the images of my handwritten recipes from years ago. Once I was set on this path I continued to add interesting recipes read through Feedly or clipped from the web via the Chrome extension Clearly. Once I had loaded the Web clipper extension and turned on related searches, any Google search now searched my Evernote notebooks too. 

The only problem left was all those recipes in my shelves of recipe books. Here Eat your books came into play. It indexes the recipes in your cook books, making it easy to find which cook book had that favourite recipe. You can add five books for free but need a subscription to add more.

I put this information into the presentation below for patrons of Noosa Library Services along with some other interesting food sites. The apps and sites I used are detailed in the slides.

Digitise your recipes and enjoy!