Thing 10 - Evernote, virtually a notebook

I've just spent an hour installing Evernote, reading the simple "Getting started guide", watching several helpful tuition videos, and then having a play around with the application. My first impressions are that I really like it and I think I will use it a lot for various research projects I have on the go. Being able to save web content is the main draw for me, and is something that I have, before now, been doing very inefficiently and precariously. My web browser favourites folders contain a lot of addresses saved because I wanted to archive particular content on a particular page for future reference. Saving the address is not a sensible way of archiving the content, because once the page is taken down or moved, you've lost that content forever. With Evernote, even after the page disappears, you get to keep the content. This is great! It's only taken me a few minutes to create a notebook and clip into it several web pages and screenshots that mention/show my grandad (George Hunter), whose career as a jazz musician in the 1940s, 50s and 60s I've been trying to piece together over the last few years. Fans of Ted Heath, Jack Parnell and other pioneers of big band are few and far between nowadays, so I'm glad to have archived this content before these websites disappear.

I like the way you can tag content, create multiple folders, search, make notes - generally engage in all those satisfying activities that made me want to be a librarian in the first place (organise, analyse, classify, catalogue etc.)! Another great feature is that you can save tweets to Evernote. Lots of useful pieces of information and links are disseminated via Twitter, so it's great to be able to archive these.

I've mentioned before that I'm a stationery fiend. I love having a notebook on the go for jotting and clipping useful snippets in. I definitely won't be abandoning that practice any time soon, but for me Evernote's real power lies in being a notebook for online stuff. I can cope with having two notebooks - one real, one virtual. That's not messy, that's just good sense.