Wednesday, January 14, 2009

New Essential Research Tools

David Instone-Brewer:
Our aim should be maximum time for reading, thinking and creative writing, with automatic facilities for searching, creating bibliographies and backups, and minimum time for writing and filing notes on what you've read. Utopia? Not any more.

With the following free software you can:
  • access your work on any computer, and write it at the same time as a colleague
  • never lose your work - automatically save to the internet every few seconds
  • never ruin your work - previous versions of a document are always available
  • add library catalog entries to your bibliography automatically, in your chosen style
  • attach notes to a book or article which you can search and find later
  • copy web pages or articles or documents which you can search later
  • search videos from many sources (like YouTube) and save them (increasingly important!)
  • copy pages from online books and save them as searchable documents
  • save photocopies online and search them as though they were text documents
Check out his post for four free softwares that, when combined, can do all of this.