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

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

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 !

[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.

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

FWIW, I'm working on integrating InfoQube with EN. So information in IQ will be available to EN (and the EN mobile clients) and vice-versa. This means that you'll have an independant (i.e. non Evernote Corp related) client. This should increase your confort level (at least I hope !)

Pierre
IQ Designer

Bill, I have wrestled with the same issue and will offer a few perspectives.

First, IMHO, Evernote is open technology. That is their stated intent -- to make the data yours and to provide portability on deman. You can export notes into separate .html files, and I have found that this is universal enough.

Second, IMHO Evernote being a growing, well funded company provides stability, not risk. I would worry far more about being reliant upon many of the programs discussed in this forum that are created by individual developers. If the developer is hit by a bus, then what?

Third, I agree with all of Hugh's points about scanning in general and the Fujitsu Scansnap S1500 (I use the Windows version) in particular. The scanner is fairly gentle...doubt it would hurt your papers. Integration with Evernote is very good -- you can automatically create an Evernote note AND download a backup .jpg or .pdf to your hard drive. It is pricey, but you get a copy of Adobe Acrobat thrown in... I have not regretted the buy a bit and it has become an integral part of my workflow.

Finally, I have done some archiving using Evernote and my Android smartphone. I use the camera built into the phone. The Evernote app has a function that automatically downloads a photo into the Evernote database and performs an OCR. Simple.

Vince

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:

FWIW, I'm working on integrating InfoQube with EN. So information in IQ will be
available to EN (and the EN mobile clients) and vice-versa. This means that you'll
have an independant (i.e. non Evernote Corp related) client. This should increase
your confort level (at least I hope !)

This is great news. Like Outlook, I believe that Evernote has great potential as a platform with an ecosystem of more specialised applications around it.

Will this integration include access to the OCR'd texts that EN uses for indexing/searching? Usesr don't have access to that text per se, but I was wondering whether developers can 'grab' this through the API and make it available.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Will this integration include access to the OCR'd texts that EN uses for indexing/searching?

Yes it does. :-)

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/21286-use-evernote-api-to-get-ocr-results/

This is extremely interesting and useful technical information. Thanks.

Bill

Pierre

FWIW, I'm working on integrating InfoQube with EN. So information in IQ will be
available to EN (and the EN mobile clients) and vice-versa. This means that you'll
have an independant (i.e. non Evernote Corp related) client. This should increase
your confort level (at least I hope !)

That would increase my comfort level considerably :-)
And even if I do not want to import all the stuff from EN to IQ: Could I import only particular notes from EN into IQ and process them there (e.g. using IQ's outlining features?

Franz

Franz Grieser wrote:

Could I import only particular notes from EN into IQ and process them there (e.g. using IQ's outlining features?

Of course ! Initially, sync will probably be based on notebooks (you select which ones to sync). Eventually, one could individually select which ones to sync.

Vincek wrote:

Second, IMHO Evernote being a
growing, well funded company provides stability, not risk. I would worry far more
about being reliant upon many of the programs discussed in this forum that are created
by individual developers. If the developer is hit by a bus, then what?

I am not sure that I would always equate growth and being well-funded with stability. I have seen as many, if not more, well-funded and growing companies get bought up and dismantled than I have software from individual developers that I have supported in the past. Google alone has bought and killed more growing, well-funded useful software/services than I care to recount, with Postini and Picnik being two that immediately come to mind. Microsoft bought and totally destroyed iView Media Pro, a very popular DAM program used by many photographers. On the other hand, there are software programs that I purchased over 10 years ago that were written by individuals that are still being supported.

These are only individual examples based on my personal experiences, and should not be taken as absolute evidence to the contrary, but rather as a caution against any false sense of security that growth and funding often seem to imply. And, IIRC, getting data out of Evernote used to be a somewhat difficult task, but I could be mistaken, and that could have changed as the program has evolved over time.

In short, it's always best to have a reasonable Plan B in case the unexpected happens.

--Ken

Ken wrote:

I am not sure that I would always equate
growth and being well-funded with stability. I have seen as many, if not more,
well-funded and growing companies get bought up and dismantled than I have software
from individual developers that I have supported in the past.

Definitely; here's an indicative list of good software lost for anything but lack of funding: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/7846

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Will this integration include access to the OCR’d texts that EN uses for indexing/searching?

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:

Yes it does. :-)
http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/21286-use-evernote-api-to-get-ocr-results/

This is even better news! That said, I can't say that Evernote's terms of using the API are clear to me. I was really wondering whether we would be able to see the actual text and use it further, e.g. copy/paste it.

Personally I can't forget that Evernote has a record of abandoning one set of users (including me) and the development of a perfectly acceptable (for its time) Windows PIM with with some attractive features, when another apparently more commercially-attractive notion caught their attention. That's capitalism, of course, and who's to say that Evernote as it is now doesn't have greater utility for more people. But "Fool me once..." etc. etc.

I can’t say that Evernote’s terms of using the API are clear to me. I was really wondering whether we would be able to see the actual text and use it further, e.g. copy/paste it.

It isn't clear, you're quite correct. The way I read this, and most forum posting go in that direction, that they want to prevent an app from sending an image to EN and recuperating the OCR'ed data, hence using it as an OCR service. This is not what is planned for IQ, so I think we're OK !

Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer

I have a lingering distrust of Evernote for the same reason. The early history of Evernote has been heavily mythologized by Phil Libin and others. I have no doubt that they were struggling in those days, but their melodramatic story of last-minute, providential intervention by an investor -- almost supernatural in its overtones -- is, I suspect, rather overblown. They simply saw an opportunity in a cross-platform note-taker and grabbed it; fair enough. But they tossed aside their early users in a remarkably brutal way, and I haven't forgotten that. When some of us protested that the program was being dumbed down for no apparent reason (with no explanation being offered by the Evernote folks), we were sarcastically dismissed as "power users," which rapidly became a term of abuse whenever it was invoked on their forum.

I continue to use Evernote for certain limited purposes (mainly archives of old notes), and I admire the cleverness of many of its newer features. Nevertheless, I still have vivid memories of how they treated their most loyal early users, and that is part of what makes me wary about their future.

Bill

To return to the subject of my original post . . . it strikes me that another possible substitute for Evernote in this case is a combination of PDF files and RightNote.

RightNote allows virtual links, and searches of those linked PDFs (from within RightNote) show the word or phrase highlighted and in context. Not *quite* as convenient as the more powerful search mechanism in Evernote, but close. And it means the old notes in question are preserved in a universal format that is not dependent upon the whims or fortunes of one software company.

Bill

Hugh wrote:

Personally I can't forget that Evernote has a record of abandoning one set of users
(including me) and the development of a perfectly acceptable (for its time) Windows
PIM with with some attractive features, when another apparently more
commercially-attractive notion caught their attention. That's capitalism, of
course, and who's to say that Evernote as it is now doesn't have greater utility for
more people. But "Fool me once..." etc. etc.

If I remember correctly, this was not done under the direction of the original developer, but after Phil Libin took over as the CEO, no? So we might as well be talking about a different company.

Phil Libin is an extremely clever and witty man, and I always enjoy reading his pronouncements, but I'm astonished by the truncated version of Evernote's early history that he offers from time to time. There are almost no references to Stepan Pachikov, its first developer, and Libin conveys the impression that Evernote hardly existed until he himself arrived on the scene — thus ignoring entirely its Windows-only period. This is airbrushed, revisionist history with a vengeance. I see that even Wikipedia has bought into this legend that Evernote sprang fully-formed from Libin's brow in 2008.

Bill

WSP wrote:

There are almost no references to Stepan
Pachikov, its first developer, and Libin conveys the impression that Evernote
hardly existed until he himself arrived on the scene

Thanks for mentioning the original developer, whose name escaped me. Here's an interesting interview of himself http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/27/interview-stepan-pachikov-the-founder-of-evernote-talks-about-his-future-vision-tctv/
I was obviously quite wrong in my recollection of the transition.

Remarkable guy by the way. He's got some brilliant ideas and his background suggests that he may well achieve them.

Libin has just proven me wrong by offering a public tribute to Pachikov's role in creating Evernote:

http://readwrite.com/2010/11/10/the_path_from_apple_newton_to_evernote

But elsewhere in this two-part interview he is still in a state of denial about the existence of the Windows-only Evernote before 2008. It may not be a major issue except to those of us with long memories, but it strikes me as an interesting example of Orwellian rewriting of history. If you say something often enough, you eventually believe it is true.

Bill