Tech T.I.P. 11/1/2012

Evernote for Graveyard Researc

By Denise Barrett Olson

Graveyards can be a challenging place for the researcher, but Evernote and your smart phone can simplify your research efforts tremendously.
If you're not familiar with Evernote, it is an online platform for capturing and organizing notes. These can be text notes, handwritten notes, dictated notes and photographs. Evernote will transcribe your dictation and do its best to decipher your handwriting, turning your notes into an organized and easily searchable research journal. You can clip web pages and send them to your Evernote collection. You can even email notes to your Evernote collection.

Your notes are accessible from just about anywhere. There are apps for your desktop, tablet and phone to make it even easier to create, capture and organize them. For our purposes, its the phone app that's most useful in the graveyard.

Here you see my Tech T.I.P. notebook as it appears on my iPhone. I use it to captured a copy of each Tech T.I.P. article I've written and to note topic ideas for future articles. I can tap on any item here to view the entire article. Notice the blue plus sign button at the bottom of the screen. I just tap it to add a new note to my collection.

Now you see a blank note. I can start typing or I can tap one of the icons at the top of the screen to capture a photograph (camera icon), photo I've already taken (photo gallery icon) or dictated note (microphone icon). The information icon shows the information automatically captured with each new note. This includes date, time and place - if you've got location services turned on.

It's a lot easier to dictate a note - spelling out names and other unusual words - than it is to try and type them on the tiny screen. This is especially true when you're trying to hang on to lots of other gear at the same time. Using the phone's camera to capture and send photos in one shot can be a lifesaver, although I often take several photos of a gravestone then pull them into a single note from the photo gallery. Evernote is flexible enough to support just about any workflow style.
Other than choosing the notebook to store your captured notes and maybe adding a tag or two, just concentrate on capturing the images and information you need. With an Evernote Premium subscription [$45/year] you'll have plenty of bandwidth and storage to upload everything. And, Premium users also have the offline notebook feature so they can access the contents of their cemetery notebook even when they don't have a network connection. You can clean things up, add more tags and perform other organizational tasks once you get home.
Evernote is affordable, easy and quite portable. It's a field researcher's dream.