high on OneNote

Today as been an excellent day from start to finish. I had a fun lunch with MGC. The weather is amazingly decent right now (80 degrees and a breeze), so we walked to the local burger shack and then back to his house, where he showed me a few additions to his collection.  He is teaching a summer session and working on his sabbatical application for next year.

In the afternoon, I got to work on some of the articles I've been needing to read. I decided that I should go ahead and begin integrating new info and possible leads with material I have already have. SO, I went into the OneNote sabbatical binder I set up the other day (in only the most cursory fashion) and started working toward that goal. And can I just say, I LOVE this program. Why am I just now warming up to it? I remember looking at it/playing with it momentarily, using the tablet/pen function, on my Toshiba Portege. At that point, I was mostly figuring out how to use the tablet. Since then, I've had neither the time nor inclination to do anything more with OneNote. Which is really a bummer, because it would have been a huge help for all kinds of things, exhibit development included.

I guess that is one of the superb things about sabbaticals (TH continues to remind me that mine doesn't actually start until September). They give you time, in this instance, to experiment with new ways of organizing research data and managing writing projects. So now I'm totally sold on this program, although I did spend about a half-hour freaking out because I used the "save as" function and thus moved a lot of work into a goofy location (altho it was easily recovered and moved into the right section).

And, as I was searching online for an explanation for the goof-up that I'd created by resorting to the "save as" function, that being the complete lack of a "save" option (because it autosaves)--I happened upon this discussion of DropBox, which appears to be better than MobileMe. So after I get my act fully together with this new system, I'll likely opt for that.

One of things I did today after I read this set of articles was to just clip critical passages and new citations straight out of the pdfs and paste them onto the relevant OneNote pages. On those same pages, I also embedded  the full pdfs  (copied from EndNote). I also pasted a couple images (a map and a figure) that I snipped out of the articles, resized, and pasted right next to icons of the pdfs. from which they came. I can do the same thing with digitized archival docs and links to websites and the text file I am working on. So easy. And so graphic.  And moveable and searchable (even the text of the map and figures). Pretty cool stuff. Tons of it. I sound like a Micr*soft missionary; I am not. One suggestion if you haven't used the program and decide to try it: watch the demo videos. They are hugely helpful.