System for taking and organising reading notes

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 4, 2011 at 12:32 AM

What would be the ultimate system for taking notes from readings and then organising them (e.g. for academic projects)? It would have to be something cross-platform, not just across computer platforms but also including hard copy books, newspaper etc.

I’m not satisfied with my current set-up. My notes are dispersed across machines. Some are in Whizfolders on the PC (which was good for capturing notes from PDFs and then organising them into hierarchies. Whizfolders also allows for keywords, but it wasn’t convenient enough for me to start using them). Some are in notes within Surfulater items. Others are in Notebooks for iPad. I want to get more organised for my next project.

So what would be the ideal set-up? I should be able to capture quotes and add notes from hard copy books. Perhaps some kind of digital pen scanner? PDF-reading apps in iPad/iPod can export text notes. I feel I’m missing a central database solution that would help me gather all these notes and organise them and analyse them. Whizfolders’ hierarchy is limited, once you have thousands of notes.

Anyone managed to come up with the ultimate system and workflow for capturing and organising notes from across platforms? I suppose it would make sense to somehow link the notes to references in some referencing system. I imagine Citavi could be one such solution? I just wonder how robust it is for storing, retrieving, organising and analysing tons of data. Or could UltraRecall be such an ultimate database?