System for taking and organising reading notes

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 5, 2011 at 02:04 AM

Daly,
The problem is in today’s world that handwriting just creates yet another type of medium that one needs to deal with, in addition to the digital notes taken on mobile devices and notes taken on the PC. I have used hard copy notebooks for my reading notes in the past and it turned out to be a very limited technology. I ended up with 9 notebooks with 200 pages each. So when it came to having to quickly find, collate and process information, that format was no good. I ended up having to scan them as PDFs, do that I could annotate them on my iPad and turn them into digitally searchable files. There has to be a better way.

But my original question related not only to taking notes from hard copy books but also how to bring all manner of notes, hard copy and digital, together, in a single system, with the least amount of effort. So far there seem to two suggestions: 1) photograph hard copy book sections with a smartphone and add them to Evernote, alongside all other digital files, or 2) use Dragon to dictate notes and have them transcribed into a PIM.

Ideally that PIM would also enable easy capturing of PDF text, without having to switch back and forth How may PIMs can do that? Whizfolders has such a “Watch clipboard” feature, and I think UltraRecall adds a “copy to UR” to the context menu.