Has anybody -- particularly in project management or administrative roles in DH -- reached the mystical and possibly mythical state of the paperless office? Can you recommend software and tools? Tips or pitfalls?
I'm looking at DEVONthink Pro Office which you can bundle with a bitty scanner for OCR.
I already make pretty good use of Evernote -- desktop, iPhone, and iPad versions.
Wally Grotophorst
MemberBest Answer
Funny you mention this....I just answered the "what's in my app folder" question with an endorsement of DevonThinkPro office and a ScanSnap.
I've used this combination for a couple of years now and I can positively say that it has allowed me to not only have a "paperless" office, but now I'm that guy who can put his finger on a document from last year when everyone else is still rummaging around trying to find it.
Syncing my DTPro database via Dropbox, I'm never more than a click away from documents I need no matter which machine I'm using. The AI built into DTPro (linking related documents) is also pretty slick as are the Safari and Firefox plugins that simplify adding content to your database.
Beyond clearing off my desk, I also find DTPro useful for various projects that pop up here in the library. For example, here's a blog post I did some time back that looks at the OCR capabilities of DTPro compared with a few other packages.
http://timesync.gmu.edu/wordpress/?p=965
If you're on a Mac, there's really no better solution...and they offer an academic discount. If you're on a PC, well, sorry...DevonThink only runs under OSX.
I tend to be a lone wolf, so my go-tos are Dropbox (mostly for presentation and teaching files), Evernote (for notes-to-self, because only just the other day did it become possible to edit .txt files in Dropbox on my iPod Touch), Zotero, and Google Docs (for the occasional oddball need).
I've had fair luck getting techno-unhappy colleagues to collaboratively edit GDocs. Doodle for scheduling is also a godsend, particularly if your project crosses institutional (calendar) lines.
I have a visually-oriented colleague who swears by mindmapping software. It's not my thing, but it might be yours.
Edited to add: The hardest thing, honestly, is meeting agendas when your meeting includes people who don't do any kind of portable computing. Also, in my unhumble opinion, people who email ordinary, non-formatting-dependent documents like minutes or agendas as Microsoft Word attachments are earning lots of bad karma thereby. Plain text is good!
Thanks, you two, and especially for the details on DTPro! I'm decent, myself, at generating as little paper as possible, but I do often have things handed to me that I wind up stacking all over my office and eventually filing (some) or recyling (most -- sometimes only to regret it later). Plus I inherited decades-worth of paper files from my predecessors at UVa. So it's really the workflow, filing structures, metadata, etc. for all that mess -- past, present, and future -- that I'm thinking of digitizing. I'll report back if I begin the process. In the meantime, I'd love to hear from anybody who has done.
Jennifer Vinopal
Member
Very interesting and timely conversation, as I'm right now trying to get all my stuff in sync -- all devices, everywhere. Also, because I'm cheap and don't have a smartphone (just an iPod Touch) I'm trying to figure out how to keep in sync when I'm online but have access to my stuff when offline with no wifi. So Google docs doesn't make the cut.
Just this week I started using Dropbox, Evernote (both on all devices), and Goodreader (iPad). Also, my bibliography (for now) is in Endnote, which I find a logical, easy-to-use, and responsive tool (unlike RefWorks). Have used Zotero in the past but haven't loved it -- it's just not intuitive for me. I'm just starting to play with Mendeley for bibliography and whatever else it might do for me. However, my attempt this afternoon to have it automatically create a bibliography for me by dragging in docs from my Dropbox account didn't turn out too well. It created a whole mess of, well, mess!
I'm preparing to start a big research and writing project and am wondering what combination of tools will ultimately prove so easy to use and meet so many of my needs that they recede into the background and let me simply concentrate on my research.
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