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– Xmind Mindmap tool

• Blogging ?

Mind Map (example Xmind)

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 PDFs,citations and others

Zotero is incorporating automatic extraction of citation info from existing PDF files! With beta 1.5b2. Very useful feature. Also syncs up with an online account to backup your database!! As of now beta

Mendeley

• Mendeley features automatic extraction of citation info from your existing pdf! Allows you to sync this lib with an online mendeley server. Can even backup pdf files to this server. So you can research from anywhere!

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

Use references from Mendeley for citation in word

RSS feed readers – Bloglines, MS outlook, snackr!

Closure

• You may need administrative privileges• May not be the best tools/methods available

– Free!– Some are experimental – beware of crashes!!

• pptPlex – from Microsoft Labs!

Thanks

Email: srini [dot] tata [at] gmail [dot] comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/srinitata

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

experiments!!