Tips
Software designed for managing research and information or for writing often incorporates note-taking capabilities.
Zotero
- Free, open-source
- Citations with notes
- Notes as "index cards" linked to citations
- Organizes and allows annotation of PDFs
- Excellent at capturing publicly available web pages
Mendeley
- Free
- Requires installation onto the desktop
- Organizes and allows annotation of pdfs-automatically names pdfs with article titles
- Backups onto the web
Scrivener
- Designed as writing software, rather than information/citation manager
- Must be purchased and installed
- Notes as index cards
- Writing and notes together
OCR
Scanning is not enough. To be searchable, PDFs must be OCRed (Optical Character Recognition) which means that the pdf "image" is rendered into text.
Adobe Acrobat Pro has built in OCR.
OCR is also available more or less free elsewhere though quality and features vary:
OCR is almost never 100% perfect.
For highest quality OCR and also foreign language OCR, try ABBYY.
Adobe Pro
Adobe Acrobat Pro
- Allows highlighting, sticky notes, etc. for PDFs
- Built-in OCR capability which allows a computer to "read" the text of a PDF
- Comparison of Adobe features
- Cost = reasonable at Cornell Campus Store with Cornell discount
