Evernote: Only useful for some.

Evernote is a software/service which allows users to compile notes, photos, graphs etc. into one program. I explained it to my Mother as being a tool which allowed you to digitalise everything (which was a slight exaggeration). I gave the example of recording family history (which is something that interests her so I knew she would continue to listen...) currently genealogy software is rather versatile, you can do more than just input names and dates, you can upload photographs and Birth Certificates for example.

Evernote is somewhat similar I argued (but easier to use and useful for more than just genealogy). You can set up your iPhone or Blackberry onto the Evernote website and could take a picture of a piece of text (I gave the example of a wedding invite - genealogy remember...) and have that stored onto your Evernote account. The wedding invitation is of little use to you once you have been to the wedding, however if you are some obsessed family historian it is easy to see that the document could be of some significance (it gives the date and location of the wedding). However you don't want to have the document taking up physical space (multiply the invitation by thousands of other small relatively insignificant documents that a family historian might want to record) also the invitation is likely to be misplaced unless stored in a very organised way. This wedding invitation could then be tagged which is where the great benefit of Evernote comes in - by tagging the image perhaps under a heading of "Jill & John's Wedding" all documents, notes and images related the the wedding are able to be found under the one tag. Imagine several years later being able to click on the tag and being provided the great corpus of sources connected to the wedding.

My Mother argued that it seemed quite time consuming to catalogue the documents and callous to then dispose of documents deemed previous important enough to record! Though the potential of it was seen.




To summarise, Evernote has several benefits:

* Versatile - you can digitally store everything (documents, images, notes etc.)
* Tagging - it allows you to group a collection of items.
* It's online - you can access it anywhere.
* Easy to use - you will have a better bibliography as you will record everything you use!

Though for me it has some downsides:

* Can be time consuming - is it not easier to have a physical folder?
* Antiquated? - How long will it be until Google create a better version of Evernote?
* Needs an iPhone or equivalent to be of maximum use.


I can't see myself using it for my thesis because I don't think it suits my area of study. As my period is the 1990s where almost all of my resources are either embargoed or online (some difference) I can use other programs to bookmark newspaper articles or journals for me. If I was able to access an archive and see primary material, and if I was able to use a camera phone my use for Evernote would increase.