Family History Through the Alphabet – E is for …Evernote

I set up my present Delicious account in November 2008 I have saved over 7000 links to that account; the majority of these are in the subject areas of genealogy and technology. I previously had Delicious accounts when I was working in IT. Since Delicious was sold and taken over by Yahoo! I have not been impressed with some of the changes that have been made to the product and found that I was rarely using the product.

For some time I have been seeking a product that will allow me to save and catalogue (tag) my bookmarks, videos, photos, audio files and notes and access them via the internet from all of my devices and any other computer I may be using.

I downloaded Evernote to my laptop and tablet well over a year ago; I played around with the software but not in any depth. I tried Zotero, a product developed in a tertiary institution for use by students, but found that it was not as easy to access from a range of devices especially my android tablet and phone. Recently I decided to get serious about using  Evernote .

Evernote is now installed on my laptop, netbook, android tablet and android phone. I am using the free version of  Evernote  for the moment; once I become more competent in using the product I may pay for the premium version.

It was not possible to easily transfer my 7000 links from Delicious directly into Evernote and I realised that I probably did not want to keep all of those links. This presented an opportunity to do some housekeeping. Firstly I imported all of the Delicious links into Google Bookmarks and I have been slowly going through these and adding the ones I wish to keep to Evernote. Concurrently I have been saving new links and notes I make into my Evernote.

So what exactly is Evernote? This page on the Evernote site gives a much clearer explanation then I can.

To date I only have 176 notes in my eight Evernote notebooks (or as I would call them folders).  I am tagging all of these and adding annotations to some of them. I have chosen to keep most of these notebooks private but have made two: Genealogy and Technology public. Although you can see these without an Evernote account it is preferable to have an account to access more features. Hopefully the links and notes I have made will be of some use to other genealogists.

The Evernote Web Clipper on my Chrome browser allows me to save an article,a selection, a full page or just a link with a couple of mouse clicks; I am just saving either a selection which gives me information about the notes content or just a URL. I am concerned that saving a whole article constitutes some form of plagiarism. There is a collection of other add-ins and apps that can enhance your Evernote experience but, while I am on my L plates, I will concentrate on getting my bookmarks organised.

I am Excited about the possibilities Evernote offers for collaboration.

Do you have any public or shared genealogy notebooks that others can see?