Forum Posts Feed
Digitizing old notes -- in Evernote?
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by WSP
Oct 23, 2012 at 06:12 PM
I’ve been writing books and articles for many decades, and I still have a ton of old, pre-digital notes in my study and basement. I’d like to preserve those notes; even more importantly, I’d like to have easy access to them now, because I continue to be interested in the subjects I’ve written about in the past.
I’ve been thinking lately about how to convert those notes—some typed, some handwritten, some old photocopies from books and periodicals—into a usable, stable digital format. The most obvious solution would be to run them through a desktop scanner, but that sounds like more effort than it’s worth. I don’t have a feeder on my scanner, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t be able to use it for this purpose, because most of the old notes are on thin, flimsy paper (chosen deliberately, because that made them lighter to carry around in the old days).
As an alternative, I tried photographing a few of them with an iPhone app, CamScanner, that converts a series of images into a PDF, and I then did an OCR on that PDF in PDF-Xchange View. That was reasonably satisfactory, since the OCR worked on the typed notes and printed material, but I found it slow and laborious. It was especially difficult working with the various possible settings in CamScanner, because I discovered that I had to frequently change the preferences according to the color and condition of my ancient notes.
Then this morning I did a quick experiment with Evernote. I have all sorts of misgivings about Evernote, though I’ve used it off and on for many years—even when it was still a Windows-only program. I photographed several note slips from within Evernote on my iPhone and then let EN do its OCR magic. (This took only a few minutes, since I’m a premium subscriber.) To my surprise, the text recognition results were much more accurate than in the earlier PDF experiment; EN was even able to decode much of my miserable handwriting. I also discovered, incidentally, that it was easier to do the photography on my iPad, since I was then more confident that the image was in focus.
As I thought about it, I realized there were certain other advantages of moving these old notes into Evernote: I could arrange everything chronologically by using a consistent naming scheme for the individual notes; each note could be tagged if I wished; the notes instantly became available on all my devices; it was more convenient to search in EN than in a series of PDF files; and I could, if I wished, share these notes with others with minimal effort.
But of course I also have some misgivings about this solution: Evernote locks you into their system, and it isn’t easy to liberate your information; EN likes to boast about being a 100-year company, but I find that claim a bit improbable; and if I am worried about the survival of my notes in the future (say as a gift to my university library), PDF files have much better archival prospects than a somewhat odd proprietary format like the one used by Evernote.
Has anyone else here faced up to this problem of how to deal with old notes? If so, how did you solve it?
Bill
Posted by Hugh
Oct 23, 2012 at 06:28 PM
WSP wrote:
>Has anyone else here faced up to this problem of how to deal with
>old notes? If so, how did you solve it?
>
>Bill
>
Posted by Pierre Paul Landry
Oct 23, 2012 at 06:41 PM
WSP wrote:
>Evernote locks you into their system, and it isn’t easy to liberate your information; EN likes to boast about being a 100-year company, but I find that claim a bit improbable; and if I am worried about the survival of my notes in the future
You could use a Windows client, which connects to your EN account and keeps a local copy…
HTH !
Posted by Hugh
Oct 23, 2012 at 06:43 PM
[Sorry - fat finger trouble]
Yes I have. One solution is to use a commercial scanning operation. For financial reasons I decided to DIY. I use the much-praised Fujitsu Scansnap 1500M (http://scanners.fcpa.fujitsu.com/scansnapit/?gclid=CKHWkP3hl7MCFXDLtAodKE0AvQ) - expensive, but excellent with flexible management software and a sheet feeder, plus guidance from the DocumentSnap website (http://www.documentsnap.com/pdo-spuhq/) and advice from these books (http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/paperless-office and http://macsparky.com/paperless/). All for the Mac, I’m afraid.
All this may sound like overkill, but depending on the volume of your notes there can be a lot to consider; there was for me, from automatic filing to retrieval to backup. I find half an hour’s scanning most days is the way to work through it.
Posted by WSP
Oct 23, 2012 at 07:12 PM
Pierre Paul Landry wrote:
>WSP wrote:
>
>>Evernote locks you into their system, and it isn’t easy to liberate your
>information; EN likes to boast about being a 100-year company, but I find that claim a
>bit improbable; and if I am worried about the survival of my notes in the future
>
>You
>could use a Windows client, which connects to your EN account and keeps a local
>copy…
>
>HTH !
Yes, thanks, I’ve done that already. But I still have no doubt irrational anxieties about Evernote. It’s a company that dashes off in unexpected directions from time to time, and I suppose the more serious possibility is that it will be bought up by one of the big boys (Apple? Google?) and transformed into something unrecognizable.
Still, I admire Evernote’s system of keeping a local copy on one’s own computer, and I go even further than that by backing up to a flash drive from time to time.
Bill