vortistory.blogg.se

Tagging: This feature is the primary reason I purchased DEVONthink Pro Office. I work on a lot of theatre and performance history, so my categories include labels like “Correspondence” (a larger group containing individual folders for each person), “Periodicals” (for corralling my thousands of newspaper and magazine clippings), “Production Photos,” “Playbills,” “Set Designs,” “Lighting Plots,” “Account Ledgers,” and “Souvenirs and Ephemera.” I just drag-and-drop my photos from archival research directly into the appropriate folders.Ģ. In my main research database, for example, I group my primary source documents by type. Groups: I like that I can quickly sort my documents into groups, which I basically use as folders. Given my finicky relationship with other bibliographic management and database software, I thought it might be worth sharing a bit about my experience with DEVONthink Pro Office, for other graduate students who find themselves in search of the proper tool.ġ. I’ve been using it to build research databases, to construct a bibliography and notes for qualifying exam preparation, and to help me organize potential archives as I begin to craft my dissertation prospectus. It isn’t perfect, but it’s by far the best fit I’ve found for my purposes. So when a colleague suggested I check out DEVONthink Pro Office, I figured it was worth a shot. I needed something dynamic and user-friendly to help me store and organize my ever-swelling cache of files. (If you’re interested in trying Zotero, check out this post by GradHacker writer Alex Galarza.) Heading into the early stages of dissertation research, I knew I needed to get serious about selecting a tool and sticking with it. To date, I’ve flirted with Zotero, EndNote, and RefWorks, but none of them quite worked for me. Over the past couple of years, I’ve toyed around with different software programs in a half-hearted attempt to get organized.

My habit of stashing secondary source literature is almost as bad. I’m an historian by trade, and like many other researchers, I have a tendency to accumulate messy piles of primary source documents until I forget what I have or can’t locate the proper item when I need it most. My name is Emily, and I’m an evidence hoarder. You can find her on Twitter at or at her blog, dighistorienne. Neither option requires the DevonThink program to be open to work.Emily VanBuren is a PhD student in History at Northwestern University. Another option is the “clip to DevonThink” extension available to both Safari and Firefox users. One such plugin is the DevonThink dashboard widget, which allows users to input notes quickly. Mail and Microsoft Exchange, as well as other popular Unix-based programs such as Mozilla Thunderbird.Īlthough DevonThink is a full-featured program, it comes with several ancillary plugins that extend its usefulness beyond the actual DevonThink program itself. One of the DevonThink’s other main features is its ability to archive emails through its import program. DevonThink also includes a number of smart groups (you can add others, too) for easy reference as well. The app contains a separate tag browser that makes finding files easier, provided that you tagged them when you imported them, of course. Tags are also prevalent throughout DevonThink and compliment the OCR scanned documents. The fact that the feature works as well as it does is equally important to its viability in an office setting. Assuming many offices do as I do and scan important documents into a hard drive, the ability to create searchable databases of thousands of physical documents is arguably the most important feature of DevonThink. The OCR feature is huge for offices seeking to go paperless. In subsequent testing the OCR feature worked as advertised. After importing the receipt into DevonThink, the OCR feature allowed me to search for the street address of the store and the other text on the receipt as well. The iPhone sales receipt includes information such as the street address of the store where I bought the phone, information that exists only on the scanned receipt and not in the file name or tags associated with the document. To do so, I imported my original iPhone 3G purchase receipt from 2008 into the application. As mentioned earlier, I routinely scan important documents into my Mac so I was eager to test this feature. The primary reason DevonThink can be valuable to paperless offices is its support for OCR, which translates text from scanned documents and PDFs into searchable text. I imported several important files, documents, and PDFs and let DevonThink do the rest using its default settings. I then sorted most of the documents on my Mac accordingly. Although you can create as many databases as you’d like in DevonThink, I created two for review purposes, a personal and a professional database.