Uncluttering my antiquities into the digital age

I decided to devote this week to digitizing.

 I’m never actually disorganised – I can usually locate a single volume amidst 3000+ books and I know what is in my three filing  cabinets – but in a digital age, is all this paper really necessary? 

Sometimes just the sheer volume of paper is overwhelming, and I revisit notes, trawling through my scratchings  instead of moving on confident that I have already captured some essence.

I have been building a digital system for several years, but not in a sustained way  –  this week I think I crossed the Rubicon. An academic entrenched in the past does not need to live in that forest of paper trails.

I’m not sure who will be interested in reading this blog, because you may not have the massive volume of data to cope with. But uncluttering is becoming an art form – there are personal trainers in the field. While Marie Kondo and the other Japanese experts are dealing with designer wardrobes, I have books, journal articles, notebooks, archival documents such as newspaper clippings, wills, company data, census data, etc…by the ton.  Getting bits of paper organized is worth the effort, and I thank the other bloggers who have helped me on my way.
http://www.elizabethcovart.com/work-flow-organize-research-writing/
 https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/41711738 

Last week my angst was, how I could go off to England for a couple of months and leave behind so much physical stuff associated with my work. Despite my best efforts, I still had dozens of little notebooks covering all the different topics that make up the writing of a book. I was also worried about being away from certain books that are too heavy to carry. Moreover, I knew I would be taking hundreds of archival pictures while I’m away, and I would not want to lose them, or lose the organisation of them – my images from the last Cambridge trip are still in two huge digital files, in needs of sub division. Archival work is primarily organizational work. 

Instead of writing this week, I spent time scouring the Internet for information on how other academics handle their book-size project.

Not surprisingly I discovered that none of us had ever been taught this - not for writing a thesis or completing a degree, let alone writing books. I am happy to report that now...

• The piles on my desk are shrinking

• The books are on their way back to various libraries
• I have strategic maps to link discrete sections of my book – primogeniture and moral hazard are this week’s topics - no more slushing around.

At the centre of everything is my bibliographic system, Endnote. I’ve been using it to make reference lists for journal articles, building courses, extending topics for teaching, and keeping track of my reading for more than a dozen years. My Endnote library has 2,000 plus references, covering almost everything I have read over the last ten years. In the last two years the pdf’s of the articles have joined the citations, and some notes . Using Endnote is just like using Excel spreadsheets for your tax (you don’t – you must – and this from an Excel Dummy) – the minute you have a new entry you need to add it.  I have a little trick that I have developed – every time I buy a new book, I record it in Excel for my tax, and Endnote for my research. Done. This week I extended this trick – I can now scan the receipt, even if it’s on screen, and store it into a program I’ve just bought called Evernote – more of that in a  minute. (Yes, I know it’s free, but there are good reasons for serious people to pay $90 for the big slam-bang version. Microsoft has all sorts of politics happening around collaboration and syncing - money oils the digital wheels)

ENDNOTE -  I do my best to persuade my students to suffer the learning curve of Endnote for the joy of having their whole academic life in a box.  If, for example, I want to write something on the Anthropocene (I definitely don’t) – I just search the word and come up with everything I have on the topic, and begin at my own desk instead of on the internet.   Among my students about 10% persist until they master the program. The learning curve just keeps climbing, because new versions are more complex and therefore more useful than the last. It is well worth the pain if you are writing or doing academic work.

KINDLE AND AUDIBLE – For the last decade I’ve been ambivalent about my books, and on a couple of occasions I have culled a thousand or so books from my library (my physical, sometimes mouldy, damp, brittle, wormy, moth infested library). Gradually I have been moving to digitising resources. I no longer keep fiction books. I listen to new fiction on AUDIBLE, available on my phone and Ipad and even the computers, if I get stuck. I’m speaking in brand names because these are what I know….there are plenty of variations and different packages for talking books and I-readers.

Now for those entrenched bibliophiles who just love the touchy feely thing about a real book, why would you go from nice cuddly paperbacks that can curl up in bed with you more comfortably than a digital device? I made the transition for the sake of saving my sight and saving space. Our family has enough challenges around retaining vision without adding high risk activities such as late night reading by a gorgeous Tiffany lamp - high powdered lamps are not cosy. So someone reads me to sleep…which means when I buy an Audible book, at a fraction of the cost of a physical book, I listen to a sample sound of the reader.  Meryl Streep reads books, by the way.

Many non-fiction and academic books are not available in Audible format, so I have a couple of hundred e-books on all my devices. I have about three different e readers, but Kindle gets the best work out. The trick with KINDLE is I can email documents to my Kindle address and read it anywhere, anytime. I send myself everything from long letters and reports to theses and journal articles in pdf format.  If they’re not useful, delete! I also have craft magazines and knitting patterns on my Kindle.

My physical library is almost entirely non-fiction. It is growing into a library of rare books, very personal and very old books that are not digitized.

EVERNOTE -  The inspirational point of this blog is I added Evernote to my software/apps, and although I have been a free subscriber since 2011, I have never really used it thoroughly until this week. I am never a fan of apps and software – I find so many trendy things are buggy, tricky, unfriendly.  The Luddite in me likes paper and pens without needing a hundred keystrokes to save something. This program really pulled my life together and I can see an uncluttered future.

Evernote allows you to create notebooks. I like notebooks – I have thousands of them full of disorderly notes (and that has been part of my problem). I actually like the shifting colours and penstrokes of artisan note taking. These notes map over time the construction of ideas and thoughts, and I did not want to lose my lovely moleskins and recycled milk carton covers. These digital notebooks in Evernote are more like scrapbooks – I can add notes in various formats, pdf’s, Word and Excel documents, and scanned images of my notebooks – and when I open the notebooks, everything pertaining to that topic is in the one place.  I can annotate these documents and point myself to other related documents or To Do lists.

When I get back from the UK I am going to digitize my physical filing cabinets, get rid of thousands of bits of paper. Of course it can all sync and float to the Cloud and back. 

They say that when somebody dies, a library burns. My current angst is, what if that Cloud ever bursts?