Organizing your files
You'll be much happier down the line if you think about organizing your files up front. In general it's best if you name your files consistently and store them where you can get back to them easily.
- DropboxA free service that syncs your documents across multiple computers and mobile devices.
- Google DriveAnother free service that syncs files across multiple computers and mobile devices.
- Evernote
This link opens in a new window
Save entire web pages or just pieces of them, type in your own notes, search through everything, create categories, and have access from your computer or your mobile device. - MendeleyMendeley, owned by Elsevier, lets you save and annotate PDFs. You can also search across your own and others people's collections.
- Zotero
Save, organize, share, and cite your sources -- anything from scholarship to YouTube videos. Our guide has Carleton-specific instructions for installing and using Zotero with personal and lab computers, and for getting the most storage space possible. - EndNote
This link opens in a new window
Available to Carleton people, this is a fully featured bibliographic management system. Import citations from catalogs and databases or type them in by hand, embed PDFs, search, sort, export as a bibliography in any one of hundreds of citation styles, and manage long papers with Cite While You Write. - BibDesk (Mac only)Collect and organize your citations. Upload files (you can annotate PDFs in Preview or Acrobat) and generate bibliographies.
Note-Taking Tools
- Evernote
- This link opens in a new window
Save entire web pages or just pieces of them, type in your own notes, search through everything, create categories, and have access from your computer or your mobile device. - ZoteroSave, organize, share, and cite your sources -- anything from scholarship to YouTube videos. Our guide has Carleton-specific instructions for installing and using Zotero with personal and lab computers, and for getting the most storage space possible.
- EndNote
- This link opens in a new window
Available to Carleton people, this is a fully featured bibliographic management system. Import citations from catalogs and databases or type them in by hand, embed PDFs, search, sort, export as a bibliography in any one of hundreds of citation styles, and manage long papers with Cite While You Write. - MendeleyMendeley, owned by Elsevier, lets you save and annotate PDFs. You can also search across your own and others people's collections.
- MS Word (especially Outline View)One great way to use MS Word's Outline View is to make the top level of your outline be the citation to the work you're reading, and then all sub-points be the notes associated with that work. That way you can have reading notes for multiple works in one place, fully searchable and organized.
File Types
You can take notes and make comments on Word documents by using the "review" feature.
For most of the options on this page, PDF files are far preferable to other types of files. You can save Word documents as PDFs, use the "print" menu to print web pages or other files to PDF, or use Adobe Acrobat Pro (available on all lab computers) to convert files to PDF.
Many of the annotation features work best if the PDF has been run through an OCR process (Optical Character Recognition helps the PDF reader know that the words on a screen are words rather than images, which enables things like copying, pasting, and highlighting). You can do this using Adobe Acrobat Pro, which is available on all lab machines.
Annotate PDFs
- Preview (Mac only)Create annotations using the options under the "Tools" menu.
- Papers (Mac & IOS only)Search, annotate, organize, and share PDFs.
- Skim (Mac only)Read and annotate PDFs.
- MendeleyMendeley, owned by Elsevier, lets you save and annotate PDFs. You can also search across your own and others people's collections.
- Evernote
- This link opens in a new window
Save entire web pages or just pieces of them, type in your own notes, search through everything, create categories, and have access from your computer or your mobile device.
