Archiving journals with Evernote

[Moonshiner 0]

I've been an Evernote user for about a year but never actively used it. Today I thought about how I keep Moleskine journals to document my life and how useful it would be to have all my journals archived with Evernote. It's a tedious process, I could either transcribe everything or take advantage of the document camera feature with the Evernote app. I chose the easier route and started snapping photos of each page of my very first journal. Has anyone else archived their journals using Evernote? If so do you have any tips? I'm kind of worried about the limit of how many notebooks and notes you can have but hopefully that'll increase before I ever get to that many notes.

[Nadya De Angelis 24]

I am archiving my journals and other stuff. As for tips, I have two:

 

1) Title your notes with YYYYMMDD. I borrowed this one from GrumpyMonkey here on the forum, and at first it felt very unnatural because my whole life I'm living in DDMMYYYY countries, but this is really useful for sorting notes and having a big look. Also, if you get disctracted and forget to change "Created" date, you can always do it later.

 

2) Since this is a very long story, you need to be persistent. Use Google Calendar! Make a repeated event - even 15 minutes a day or an hour every week will help to make a significant progress. 

 

Also, check this out: http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/33422-evernote-journal-progress-report/

[Don Sakers 98]

I successfully migrated over 40 years of journals to Evernote. Most of them were on looseleaf pages, but some were in notebooks. I used my Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner; I dismembered the notebooks so everything could go through as separate sheets.

 

I think your workflow, using the Evernote document camera, should work as well.

 

The whole process took me slightly longer than two years, and fills nearly 15,000 notes (one per day, with an additional one per month and one more per year as visual indexes).

 

Now, as I continue to discover old papers, I scan them and have a place to put them: attached to the day in question. Most recently, I discovered the confirmation letter I received when I started my current career back in 1980.

 

As a bonus, I can throw away over 99% of the old paperwork that I scan. (Not the journals, though -- I kept the paper copies, I'm not exactly sure why.)