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Messages - melitabel [ switch to compact view ]

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1
Thanks! I missed that when I read the book (I confess to reading more to find out what happened than for detail, need to go back).  I will tell this story when I talk about it.

It looks more like EverNote than OneNote at first glance, but I'll take a longer look later.  I do need to find products which can work with both because we have people working on teams with both machines.  When this discussion started in 2006, note talking was entirely personal.  Now, there is little that I do without thinking, how will I be able to share this if I want to?

2
Well, that's something, anyway.  We aren't going to adopt Office 2010 anytime soon, on the grounds that it's a memory hog, so I won't worry that I'm missing anything.  I did hope that there would be aversion of OneNote for Mac, but I think I would have heard of that by now, if so.

Thanks!

3
Following up on OneNote 2010.  I have liked OneNote 2007 more and more, not just for myself but for small team projects.  I'd like to hear from people using 2010.  So afraid MS will mess this up . . . 

The two things I have not found easy to deal with are

(1) sharing (doesn't work for us on Sharepoint and we are trying to get rid of shared folders, I assume Google sites won't handle it, and reportedly it doesn't always sync well through Dropbox) and
(2) changing permissions or moving a notebook once you've set it up.  I've never been able to do it.  Otherwise, amazing.

I do use various information mapping tools though: Compendium and Personal Brain, which have both been mentioned, I believe.

4
General Software Discussion / Re: SQLNotes...what is it exactly?
« on: June 04, 2008, 01:36 PM »
I'm so glad to hear you say that, Dormouse, because I can't get through to the other email address either - do you have something against Georgia Tech, Pierre? - so will have to post here, exposing my ignorance for all to see.  [Takes deep breath} So here goes.

Dear Pierre,

I was a contributor to the note-taking software discussion on donationcoder, and I have noticed also the thread on SQL Notes.  I am making a presentation on personal information/knowledge management software to a group of other librarians in Seattle in 2 weeks, and I wondered if I could get some screenshots from you to give them an idea of how they could use SQL Notes.

Librarians usually have not just the usual kinds of information (anything from contacts to client tracking), but also personal reference collections (web sites often) and downloaded reports, articles and papers, which can be anywhere from 2 pages to several hundred.

While I am demonstrating a few of the programs, I would like to just mention SQL Notes, since it is still in beta and I don't use it myself.  However, I would like to show them a screenshot of an example that includes a lot of text, since that is one of our particular needs.

To give you some context, I have divided organizers into several types.  Here’s the list with the programs I am going to mention:

Information Mappers: Personal Brain, Topicscape, Compendium
The Digital Reading Pile: Zotero, Surfulater
The Digital Junk Drawer: Evernote
Text-friendly databases: InfoSelect, SQL Notes

So, what I asking is

1.   Do you have, and would you share with me so that I can use it for this presentation, screen shots of a database that contains large amounts of text (reports, for example)?  The screen shot would be used in the handout, which will be available online for the conference attendees – typically 5000+ people.  I don’t expect more than 50 to come to this session, but it will be available to everyone online.  I plan to use a Creative Commons license for my presentation, so that people will be able to re-use it, with attribution.  I could however put a standard copyright notice on your screenshots. 

2.   To describe what SQL Notes does, may I use the following statement found in the discussion at https://www.donation...x.php?topic=10432.0?

“The ideal information management app must be an excellent outliner with multiple parents support (when required), an excellent linker (i.e. like the web), an excellent tagger, an excellent editor supporting rich text editing in the outline AND in a second rich text window, support flat and tree-structured display with or without a data grid, usable as a flexible database supporting user-defined fields, calculations (both equations and user-defined functions), reporting and an have excellent search engine. Finally, it needs to have a customizable UI, support drag-drop and have links to all other major apps. Idealy, it should be able to pull information from external sources as well.”

If I may use it, how should I attribute it? Pierre Landry, designer, SQL Notes, ??
Please let me know how you would like me to cite your name, relationship to SQL Notes, and some kind of contact information, such as an organization and city (Quebec, I believe?). 

Since mutual disclosure is only fair, I will say that I am a librarian at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and my name in that world is Elisabeth Shields.


5
General Software Discussion / Re: SQLNotes...what is it exactly?
« on: June 04, 2008, 11:11 AM »
Thanks, Pierre.  I've resent the email to [email protected].  Rather long and tedious for others here, I thought.

6
General Software Discussion / Re: Mind-Mapping Software
« on: June 04, 2008, 10:11 AM »
I use Personal Brain, which is also an information mapper which allows multiple parents and peer relationships between items.  I have looked at Topicscape, but I'm finding it hard to figure out and I don't like the visuals as well.  PB gives me an inherently networked view of my information, which I can't figure out how to get in Topicscape.  Also, while Topicscape offers more choices everytime I click on a node, it always ends up being more steps to take to do something simple, like attach a link to a web site.

PB also incorporates Boolean searching, which is another really important feature. 

PB does have features of a relational database - it has entities to which you can assign properties and relationships.  I happen to prefer a visual interface to a database like SQL Notes.

Vic, I think you used to use PB - I'd be interested in hearing what you like better about Topicscape.

VizAcc, this is a very crowded field.  Look at VicGee's master list - the best I've ever seen - before you invest much time in such a project.

7
General Software Discussion / Re: Software for Mindmapping etc
« on: June 04, 2008, 10:02 AM »
I have used Personal Brain for some time.  It is very different from most "mind mapping" software - one of the very few that has the feature I couldn't live without: it supports multiple parents and peer relationships, so that it creates a web of information.  You also don't see down one branch; you see the parts of the web that you specify.  Learn about it www.thebrain.com.  They have user forums as well as a Friday teleweb introductory seminar.  There are several YouTube demo clips also.  Topicscape is another that allows these relationships, but I don't know if you can create the same network views, and I can't get into their pyramid and cone visuals.

8
General Software Discussion / Re: SQLNotes...what is it exactly?
« on: June 04, 2008, 09:56 AM »
Pierre -

I have been trying to reach you at the betasupport address that's on your website, but I'm getting a message that there's an SMTP problem with your server.  I am doing a presentation on personal information organizing software to a group of librarians in 2 weeks.  I would like to give them a peek and overview of SQL Notes, since so many people here like it.  However, I have questions for you, since I don't use it myself, and I need your explicit permission for a couple quotes I would like to use.  Is there another email address I can use?   I don't use Outlook Express - is that what's causing the problem?

9
nevf,

Very cool. This will make Surfulater much more useful to me. 

10
I see that Wikipedia mentions the slowness of Tiddly Wiki based programs, which is likely to be especially troublesome in Mozilla-based browsers.  I'm interested, but slow I don't need.  I'll be following this thread to see what kind of experience others have.

11
Othalian, thanks for the link to http://www.mind-mapping.org - great resources.  I use both Personal Brain and Compendium, which has lately been mentioned on this thread.  I like Personal Brain because items can have multiple parents, and I never lose myself in the display as I've done with some other mind mappers.

Are there any librarians reading this thread?  I am doing a presentation at SLA on how librarians can use mind mapping and other note taking tools to organize their own information and communicate it to their clients.  I'm looking for a co-presenter - I don't want to talk all by myself for the best part of an hour.  If you are going to Seattle, and have an interest, please let me know.

12
I have used Net Snippets more than any other program, though I also have Surfulator and EverNote.  What makes Net Snippets stand our for me is the automatic report feature.  My  job entails finding information, organizing it, summarizing and commenting on it, and then emailing it to clients. 

I've always found editing slow when I have a large report and want to use Word as the editor.

Since NS isn't being sold or supported anymore, can anyone suggest which other programs might best approximate this reporting/sharing function?

13
General Software Discussion / Re: have you tried mind maps?
« on: October 19, 2006, 03:56 PM »
I have tried Personal Brain.  The problem is that I have tried too many things in the search for the best software for all my information needs.  I'm a research librarian who works with about 200 staff in an institute within a university (I work with few students).  I also advise people on KM stuff, and would like to be able to show them options for managing all the stuff they need to keep track of, keeping in mind that different things work for different people.

I have also tried EverNote and am trying Surfulater (as a result of the Note Taking software discussion, on the strength of which I became a member of this site).  I use Net Snippets for stashing research and editing it for client reports. Of course what happens is that I only skim the surface of each AND my information gets split up in different places.

What I liked about Personal Brain other people hate: whatever you're working on at the moment becomes central, and you can see the parent and children of that thought.  It's also good at lateral links.  Most people want to see the whole hierarchy, and Personal Brain probably leaves some people feeling lost or unanchored.  That's not a problem for me, though.  Still, I haven't completely committed to it over the other programs.  In fact, I'm still dating them all.

14
This is the best discussion I've ever seen on this subject.  I am a research librarian who also works on knowledge management from the organizational and personal points of view (and they are very different).  My department is making some progress on the organization level - I am now trying to help people with personal knowledge management.

Since our needs go beyond note-taking to web capture and importing/accessing other files on one's machine from Word documents to email attachments, I want to ask whether I should open a new discussion topic.  I certainly wanted to acknowledge the quality of this discussion before doing so - I have benefited from the general discussion, since it stretched to organizing information as well as note-taking. 

I use Ever Note for my "little" notes to myself - user IDs and passwords, birthdays, etc; Net Snippets for reports to my clients when they consist of a lot of web-captured information that I want to organize and comment and; and I have used Personal Brain from The Brain, though I haven't bought it yet.  I've tried the IE version of Onfolio (I heard about it just after MS bought it); once used Info Select (back in the Word Perfect days) - in fact, I've dated many programs and so far married none myself (well, except Net Snippets, but I have nothing against software polygamy).

Johnk raised an issue of importance for me and my clients: do we keep adding specialist tool to specialist tool, or do we look for one main application with maybe a couple satellites?  I am trying for the latter, and I think most other people in my organization will as well.  Otherwise, we risk being slowed down too often by trying to figure out which program our data is in -- and the whole point is that we need to be information-centric, not program-centric.


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