organizing written notes electronically

January 9, 2007 11:47 AM

what is the best way to save written notes electronically for mobile use? i am a physician and i have about 500 pages of written notes from printed powerpoint lectures that i have bound into two volumes. I have attended subsequent lectures and now i don't know what is the best way to encorporate this new info as well as new info going forward. i carry a treo 650 and have access to hospital computers but i do not have an "assigned" computer so i am thinking of a portable mode. making PDF's seems to make sense but then how do i keep them accessible for those quick questions that come up during hospital rounds? How about putting them on those "keychain" portable disks? Interested in suggestions....
posted by dstrouse91 to Education (10 answers total)

I say suck it up and pay somebody to type the notes out. Then make a bunch of .pdf files. The resulting text will be keyword searchable, so however you choose to access the .pdf, you should be able to use the search feature to call up the relevant text when you need it.
posted by felix betachat at 12:00 PM on January 9, 2007

I would check out a TiddlyWiki. A personal wiki like that would, IMHO, be the easiest way to categorize and cross reference it.
posted by slavlin at 12:01 PM on January 9, 2007

Best answer: I'll combine/elaborate on both suggestions. Make pdf's of all the files, and store then on a flash drive (ie the keychain drive). Then use a Tiddlywiki (also stored on the flash drive) to link to the pdfs, tagging as necessary to keep everything organized.For each pdf, you could also extract the text using one of many PDF-text converters, and put that text into each TiddlyWiki post (that also links to the pdf) for easy searching. It'd be a lot of work to set it up, but worth it in the end.
posted by cgg at 12:26 PM on January 9, 2007

PDF seems a bad route to me - PDFs are harder to search, and harder to notate and edit. You make those sacrifices to use PDF in order to gain the advantage of typography - a page layout that doesn't change when viewed on different machines. Ensuring a fixed typographic layout is not very important for transcribed notes, so you're paying a hefty price with no real payoff. A wiki (or something similarly based on simple text files) seems to offer more function and less hassle.

You would probably like MS Onenote, but I don't know if it can run off a USB thumbdrive, and to some extent you would be locking yourself into it.

I do second the idea of getting the notes transcribed by someone else though. A little money down and the biggest hurdle is solved.
posted by -harlequin- at 12:36 PM on January 9, 2007

You could just buy a small tabletpc like the samsung q1. It could do everything you need and it's portable.
posted by apdato at 1:30 PM on January 9, 2007

Oops - i read that as 500 printed pages from powerpoint presentations, instead of 500 pages of notes. Never mind what i said earlier; I was trying to retain the graphics, etc of powerpoint slides. Instead, i'll nth the recommendation to have the notes typed up; after that the possibilities are endless.

If you have really neat and clear handwriting, you could also invest in some good OCR software to convert the notes to text. But considering you're a doctor, i'm guessing that probably won't work! :)
posted by cgg at 1:40 PM on January 9, 2007

Try scanning first and see if OCR (character recognition) software can get your handwriting to text reliably. THEN, even a pdf will let you search it.

But, try OneNote too -- I used it during medical school and if you can get the hang of it, you'll be set.....You can get a free download .

(Also, as a physician who has been on mefi for over a year yet has asked 7-8 questions but given no answers....please help out people on the health questions. I always want to, but you seem to be an attending level, you're answers will be better than mine. Try answering about one a month.....)
posted by skepticallypleased at 1:41 PM on January 9, 2007

I would have the notes typed out in text format and then import them into a tree-style organizer such as TreePad or into a more powerful organizer such as Zoot. These programs are designed to handle large volumes of text and to give you a good organization interface.
posted by megatherium at 2:04 PM on January 9, 2007

How do you access the notes now? If you have brief descriptions, then tags would be a good analog.

Since the notes are in PhotoShop, you can extract them as text and paste them into a Word document. Then put them on a near-palmtop Windows computer you can carry around. For example, the Toshiba Libretto U100, which they recently stopped making, is available on eBay, and they currently make others nearly as small in the $800 range new. True palmtop Windows computers with slide-out thumb keyboards are being introduced now, but they'll be expensive for about a year.

The Word search function is not quite quick enough to go through 500 pages of text. However, PhotoShop puts only a few words on a page. As text, your 500 pp. could easily be reduced to, say, 75 pages, for which the search function is plenty fast.

Even better are the free search engines from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. I use Wilbur, which pulls up words in context in a blink.
posted by KRS at 9:13 AM on January 10, 2007

Response by poster: i was interested more about the tidliwiki idea. since that seems to be a nice way to carry everything.

can you use that on a palm treo 650 as well as a thumbdrive since i cary the palmpilot all over the hospital anyway?
also, if you create pdf's, should you make each pdf file a "section" of the knowledge base? can you later add and delete images from them as you see fit or are you stuck?

(to skepticallypleased, thanks for the input. i can answer health questions--i am a cardiac electrophysiologist--but i never saw them when i look at the recent postings. i'll keep an eye out for them)

appreciate the input thus far...


david
posted by dstrouse91 at 10:40 AM on January 10, 2007