This week’s problem:

• After a lengthy Google Search you find a gem of information
• A colleague sends you a brilliant link or tip in an email

What do you do with these? How do you ensure that you can find them again when you need them?

With a trusty notebook and pen I pestered LTDS colleagues for ideas…

Bookmarks

Lynsey suggested bookmarks as “saving stuff 101”.

Look for the Star on the IE or Chrome address bar.  If you want to move to the next league you can organise these into folders.  (see Chrome instructions and IE instructions)

My Bookmarks on the Staff Homepage

Have you spotted “Customise My Bookmarks” on the Staff Homepage?  No longer any need to trawl for ages to find the list of active purchasing agreements etc.

Try adding a hard-to-find-University-page as a bookmark – it will take a jiffy and you can even modify the order.  (Carol is our resident expert.)

OneNote

Janice and Carol were keen to include OneNote on our list of great tools.  You may even remember that we had a look at OneNote back in Thing 3.  Carol points out that it works well with other Office Products — I didn’t know that you can  move an email straight to OneNote. Here’s how it goes:

https://youtu.be/-V_hiKHPqr0

And you can email stuff to OneNote notebooks too. And there is a webclipper for Chrome.  And… can you tell I really like OneNote?

Evernote

Evernote is a third party tool that synchronises notes you take between your PC, Mac, tablet, phone.  You need to signup to create an account and it can be used free as long as you only want to use the App on two devices – still OK for most people.  Some of the really neat things about it are:

• it works really well on a smartphone (OneNote is a bit clunky on phones).
• text on photos you add to Evernote becomes searchable –  it scans and OCRs the photos for you.  (Yes it does work on photos of business cards!)
• It is very easy to use – for proof see this much more professionally produced video.

Social Bookmarking Tools (Delicious and Diigo)

How about if you want to share web bookmarks with a bunch of colleagues involved in similar work? For this Graeme suggests a tool like Delicious.  You have to create a free account, and add a bookmarklet to your browser (no need for admin rights to do this thankfully).

Then you can get cracking adding links to Delicious.  You can share your links, as Graeme has done, search other user’s links and follow other people.

Diigo is a similar tool, also giving you a publically visible list (see this list from The Enterprise Shed). We’ve also had a go at presenting some of these links in a more organised manner using Diigo’s Outliner feature.

Other Strategies

Our colleagues suggested:

• Email the link to yourself (but put something useful in the email other than “useful link”)
• “Just remember it”
  (you know who you are.. youth must be on your side!)

So, have I missed anything?  If so add it to the comments.  Try out one or more of these ideas and let us know how you got on.