clipping into evernote and preparing teaching material

[gtuckerkellogg 33]

Like a lot of people, I use Evernote to collect material from the intertubes and use it in later composition. One big role is in preparing teaching material.

Among Evernote's many great features, the combination of these three is invaluable

1. When I clip something into Evernote from the web, including an image, it saves the source URL.
   
2. Merge notes. I think this is an underutilized feature, but I use it often. If I'm reading an article and I think several figures from the same article might be useful as a case study in a class, I'll merge notes with the different pictures.
   
3. Note links. Need I say more?
   

If I'm taking notes from the scientific literature, I don't take the notes directly in Evernote, but use a proess like this http://twitpic.com/4bsq3g, which lets me get the notes into Evernote using tools that are more suited for the purpose.

The source URL is really handy when preparing presentations to make sure I can point students (or a seminar audience) to the source, as well as providing proper citation to the image source. This may be the biggest time saver for me, since I sometimes have active bursts of energy, and toss a lot of stuff into Evernote. If I were using any other system, I'd have to make note of all the URLs myself, but with Evernote it just happens.

It would be very convenient to have a URL to the attachments, not just the note links. As I mention above, keeping URLs back to images clipped from the web is not ony a time saver, it prevents accidental use of unattributed images. But if I export images to my filesystem the connection between the image and the URL from which it was clipped is broken. I currently use http:// image links via Evernote Web, but if those links are really permalinks, perhaps the client applications could provide a mechanism to copy them.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,320]

i didn't understand the last sentence of your post. it seems to me that keeping your sources (images) separate from your lecture notes, etc. would be the best under the current system (i rarely merge notes). a note link to the note containing the image would for all intents and purposes be a link to the attachment. this is how i manage such things. however, not being a meta kind of guy, i tend to copy and paste bibliographic information into the note content. the lack of meta functionality on mobile devices has probably influenced my thinking in this regard.

[gtuckerkellogg 33]

I should state up front: this particular tangential wish of mine is very, very -- very -- niche, and I would not expect Evernote to pay any attention to it.

But since you asked! I'll use an example. Today I gave a lecture in a bioinformatics course, and included in it an image which i got from a database at a public web site. I have the image clipped into Evernote, and happily the URL is there without my lifting a finger, along with all my notes about what I was doing when I made the image.

If I were using PowerPoint or Keynote to make my presentations, I could make sure to keep a note link in my presentation notes when I pasted the image into the presenation. But then I would be using Keynote or Powerpoint, and my presentation would look correspondingly awful. Instead, I use the awesome combination of emacs+org+latex+beamer, which can (with a few tricks) grab images from URLs I specify and insert them into a beautiful presentation. I do this right now from local copies of the images, but would prefer to do it from Evernote Web, so I never make local copies of the images and never accidentally lose the metadata about them.

Did I mention it was niche?

[GrumpyMonkey 4,320]

niche indeed

i always download images. websites change a lot, and i don't want to lose access, not to mention the dangers of relying on a connection when speaking in public (even Jobs got hit by this problem).

[ping13 31]

[...]

It would be very convenient to have a URL to the attachments, not just the note links. As I mention above, keeping URLs back to images clipped from the web is not ony a time saver, it prevents accidental use of unattributed images. [...]

Actually, the Evernote infrastructure could keep the URL links using resource attributes (which are available for developers in their API, http://www.evernote.com/about/developer/api/ref/Types.html#Struct_ResourceAttributes). Unfortunately, the current webclippers do not store the note links (see http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/21425-missing-resource-attributes-for-images-in-clipped-notes/page__fromsearch__1 for a discussion) and the current clients do not expose these hidden attributes of a note.

[gtuckerkellogg 33]

That helpful. Thanks schalker!

@Grumpy: I wouldn't go back to the database itself to get the image again. I'd go to Evernote web to get the image (via the URL to Evernote Web) when I automagically generate the presentation from emacs. I just wouldn't export the image from evernote onto my hard disk, as I do now. Once I export it from Evernote, I have to remember where that image is in Evernote, since its location is detached from my notes about it. Exporting the image kind of undercuts what evernote is doing for me in the notes. Those notes include the URL telling me where an image came from, of course, which I point students to if they want to use the example as a basis for their own analyses.

[Jared Seeger 0]

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