Organization Monkey

…because it was too hilarious not to try.

there are two more images linked from the daily what site that i haven’t tried yet. somehow this crudely drawn image was just the right amount of satisfying.

(thanx, the daily what!)

i would have lost my mind by now if it weren’t for atlas.ti.  i’m working with a corpus of 24 scholarly articles published in information/library science journals, picking out examples of marketing techniques used to promote electronic resources at the authors’ institutions.  in addition to keeping a list of the actual techniques i’m interested in recounting the authors’ words in my summary, to help keep the techniques in context with the institutions.  i started this in excel and it soon got out of control, all that copying and pasting into cells, and the inevitable scrolling.  with atlas.ti i’m able to put the text of the 24 articles into the program, highlight the text i want to capture, and give that highlighted text a code that i’ve created.  in this way, for example, i’m able to highlight text related to an author’s description of emails that he sends to faculty to market an electronic resource, and then give that text a code of “email.”

when i’m done coding all the texts i can export the codes along with the highlighted text, giving me a list of all the ways “email” has been used to market electronic resources.  this will permit me to understand the breadth of how this particular technique is used across the variety of institutions in the articles.  doing this in excel would have taken a long time, considering the number of marketing techniques i’m bumping into in the literature.

curious about the program?  you can code images, movies and sound, in addition to text.  check out their web site, watch a video tutorial, or download a free trial.  i’ll be showing the program off if i have time at my upcoming presentation of this research at the electronic resources and libraries conference.

read how to travel without paper printouts of hotel confirmations, maps, or driving directions by reading my “paperless traveler” profile on the evernote blog.  they even included a picture of me with the profile!  the write-up includes instructions on how i used evernote, my iphone and dell mini on a recent driving trip from l.a. to napa.

back in november i made a driving trip from los angeles to napa and decided to try it as my first paperless trip.  i used evernote on my iphone and dell mini laptop to store driving directions, maps, and emailed my evernote account with hotel confirmations and other details that i would normally have printed out.  it worked beautifully!  i forgot to tell you the best part, though.  when i got home from my trip i had an email waiting for me from evernote, asking how my trip was.  i called them and we talked about how i had used the service.  at that point the software was so new they hadn’t heard of anyone using evernote for paperless travel.  neat!  first!

i had a trip to seattle a couple weeks ago and went paperless again, using evernote as my traveling brain.  i uploaded my flight and hotel confirmation, shuttle confirmation, daily conference schedule, and a bus map to get me to archie mcphee.  i had my laptop with me so sometimes i would check my daily schedule there, and sometimes i would check it on the iphone.  not having to fumble around my bag for stray important bits of paper is so nice.

if traveling light and paperless is your idea of a good way to travel, consider using evernote.  it works on the mac, pc, and iphone.

Dropbox

Summary: Online storage tool that synchronize your files across multiple computers.  How can a synchronization system be considered an organizational tool?  I don’t have to remember where I put my thumb drive, remember to bring home my external hard drive, or email myself any files.  Time saved = organization!

Review and how-to: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/dropbox-review-invites-and-7-questions-with-the-founder/

Here’s a link from the cogscilibrarian to a document she wrote and shared with a class via Dropbox.

personal notes: I’ve been testing Dropbox while writing my latest article. I have a PC at work, a Mac desktop at home, along with a Dell Mini laptop. I installed Dropbox on all machines and have been working on my article at whichever computer I happen to be in front of at the time, all without a flash drive or emailing myself files. In my Dropbox for this article I was working with the programs Excel, SPSS, and Word.  Dropbox allows me to save those files in their native formats, no conversions necessary.