After much back and forth I think I have discovered that for me and my intended goals, it makes more sense to do bibliographic work and take notes using Zotero than Evernote. Big deal, huh? Well it might be.

I hope to be researching and writing in the broad and as-yet not-too-clearly defined area in the history of the Appalachian Trail. I am not too sure what I mean by that. The Trail is pretty well-defined. My research and writing goals are not.

So on I go. This blog may become active again. It may be a place I take public note of whatever I find that I think might be of interest to others. It might be a lot of things. But, if it really becomes active, it should be more than merely a place to record notes from hikes I take.

Zotero was created, as I understand it, as a free software for academics in the humanities to use for corralling their bibliographies and reading lists. But what I just discovered is that one can also attach an infinite (?) number of notes to each source. THAT was my real sticking point. (Or one of them.) I couldn't quite see how taking notes on the sources could easily be accomplished. Maybe it was a recent update of the software. Or maybe I just hadn't dug deeply enough. Anyway, voila!

What I'm not yet completely convinced of is the long-term preservation of notes and bibliographies. I'm old enough, or old-fashioned enough to fear cloud storage, to fear hard-drive failure, to fear out-dated hardware and software (anyone want a master's thesis written in Bank Street Writer on an Apple IIe and stored on several 5.25 inch floppy discs?). Luckily I have it printed out on actual paper; there's a paper copy at my seminary library; and there are microfiche copies in a couple libraries around the country.

Will whatever I'm putting into Zotero live as digital data for as long as I would like it to? One can say that everything on the Internet lasts forever, but it doesn't. Someone somewhere is maintaining it as transient bits and bytes on a server. Yes, lots of copies keep stuff safe, but that isn't intended for my personal data. So I'm still working on that part of my puzzle.

Evernote still seems to me to be an excellent tool for 'on the road' collection of stuff. At the moment I picture using it for grabbing information from random sources, particularly ones that are not online digital sources (a road sign, photograph I take at a conference, a menu in a restaurant, whatever). Then if it needs to be incorporated into my research database and notes, transferring it -- by hand if necessary, or by finding a way to connect the two, even if jury-rigged.

The web at the moment seems full of scholars and researchers, academic and otherwise, looking for the one best tool to meet their needs along these lines. I'm adding my voice. Maybe I'll be one of the people who ends up happy with his choice over the long run, and keeps adding notes about how it's going.