Using Freeware for research work

Ideation aspects

Closing notesRetrieval & Application aspectsStorage aspects

Searching aspectsPersonal

Knowledge Management

Srinivasan TatachariUsing IT for Research

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Abraham Lincoln

Is there a choice?

• Information is moving to electronic versions• Is there a choice?• Intimidating? Faint-hearted??• Learn new tools?

Personal Knowledge Management

• Stages– Ideation– Search– Storage– Retrieval– Application

• Artifacts– Research papers, Ideas, electronic versions of

books, handbooks, snippets from websites ….

Ideation

• Scribbles, notes• Mind-mapping tools– Helps in abstraction, conceptualization and

collation of ideas– Brainstorming & collaborating– ConceptDraw Mindmap tool

• Blogging ?

Mind Map

Seek & Receive

• You search on-need or receive when ready– Library visits, journals by mail

• Google – the God of search? – Scholar– Sometimes just old Google.co.in

• Other databases: JSTOR, EBSCO …

• Usage of search keywords is ‘key’ to the search!

References -> A to Z of EBSCO

Respective journals’ website

Seek & Receive

• Email subscriptions for notifications – New articles, journals

• E-Mailing lists like those of AOM– Discussions, information sharing

RSS feeds directly from journal sites

Subscribing to RSS

Bloglines.com

MS Outlook 2007

Email/RSS feed from Google Alerts

OR

Google Scholar Alerts using yahoo pipesPipes: Google Scholar RSS/email

Storing

• Print documents – physical archive, highlight– Highlight in PDF (License?)

• Manual classification: Folder structure, Filenames

• Personal Knowledge Management: e.g. KnowledgeTree software – Tag, classify, keywords, type of documents

Store snippets, urls, images… in Evernote

Zotero for Firefox stores citations and others

Endnote – no site wide license!

Retrieval & Application

• B(u)y memory !• Go by manual classification and open each file

to searchOR….

Use desktop search tools: Copernic Desktop Search

Similar to (better than?) Google Desktop

Retrieve snippets from Evernote

Use references from Zotero for citation in Word

RSS feed readers – Bloglines, MS outlook, snackr!

Textflow – collaboration over Word

Closure

• You may need administrative privileges• May not be the best tools/methods available– Free!– Some are experimental – beware of crashes!!

• We could obtain commercial versions

• pptPlex – from Microsoft Labs!

Thanks

Now it would be great if you could share your ideas from your experience/

experiments!!