[Tech tips] Qiqqa

Qiqqa is a free software program designed for academics and the way we need to use PDFs.  It’s available for Windows and Android.

I couldn’t imagine going through graduate school without it.  Seriously.  It’s that good.

Qiqqa helps organize your PDFs in a library.  It uses GoogleScholar to help you quickly import citation information into the library, so you don’t have to type it.

You can annotate your PDFs and produce annotation reports that can make paper-writing a breeze.

You can backup your data online and sync your data across computers.

It is hands-down one of my most favorite pieces of software – ever  - and if you are a Windows user and you haven’t taken it for a spin, you are missing out on one of the secret weapons available to you in your academic career.

(If only this had been available when I was an undergraduate!)

Want to learn more?  Check out my instructional video (below), and visit Qiqqa.com.

(Watch the video in the full screen view so you can see what I’m demonstrating.)

[Tech tips] SpiderOak

I am a big fan of DropBox, which is an application that helps you sync files from your hard drive into the cloud.  It’s wonderful for people who have to use different computers, but forget to email things to themselves or carry their USB drives so that they can access their files wherever they are.  It’s also really helpful to know that there is a place where you can store your files and never, ever dump coffee on them.  Most importantly, you can set it up to sync your files automatically, so that you don’t have to remember to do it.  You can even set up parts of your synced files to share with other users, so sharing is easy, too.

The one drawback to DropBox, though, is that it is not particularly secure.  It’s secure enough for mundane things, but the really important things that you want to back up are not necessarily safe there.  There were recent security breaches at DropBox that made me search for a better solution.

I just discovered SpiderOak.  SpiderOak is similar to DropBox, in that it syncs your files to the cloud.  But before it does that, it encrypts them.  If someone were to steal data from SpiderOak, they would need your encryption key to read your files.  SpiderOak doesn’t store your password, which is how your encryption key is made.   (If you want to read more about the encryption technology they’re using, visit this page.)

SpiderOak is slightly more complicated to setup than DropBox, and it takes a while to do your first major backup of files.  (That’s because they need to be encrypted first.)  But once the file syncing is set up, it’s really easy and fast.  They also have really helpful videos and instructions on their site to walk you through the process.

Having said that, I want to remind my academic audience that it is not appropriate to store certain kinds of information in this way.  For more details about privacy and security for student data, please read this statement.

If you decide to switch, you might want to take a few minutes and think about the ways you use DropBox.  If you’re sharing folders, for instance, you’ll have to let people know that the folders are moving elsewhere, and give people access to the new folders.  Switching might be a little more complicated than just pushing a button.  Still, I think it’s worth it.

(For more information on DropBox security, check out this post. Also, their news terms of service are poorly written, which calls into question whether you own your files.  Here is information on a complaint to the FTC about DropBox.)

[Tech tips] Google+

Maybe you’ve heard about Google+ (“Google Plus”) in the news, or someone you know sent you an invitation  (lucky you!).  What is this thing?  And how do you use it?

In brief, Google+ is a new social networking service, very similar to Facebook, but with some specific details that make it better than Facebook.*  Where Google+ excels is in the ability to group together your friends into totally separate Circles, so you have easier control over what each Circle of friends can see.  (Facebook allows you to do something like this with lists, but it is not intuitive to figure out, and you always wonder if it is really working, anyway.)

Google+ also allows you to engage in video chat with multiple people.  This might be a good way to do study groups in the future, or to collaborate on group projects.

To find out more about Google Plus, you can visit their demo page: http://www.google.com/+/demo/. They also have a more detailed FAQ page: http://www.google.com/support/+/

If you want to use this service, but don’t have an invitation, you can sign up on this page to be notified when it is available to the public:  https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleplus/.

One of my favorite features in Google+ is the “+1″ (“plus one”) button.  If you use Facebook, you know that it has a “Like” button.  Imagine though, that you have a friend who just posted a really important, but horrific, news story about war crimes, for example.  While you want other people to read the story, you might be reluctant to use the “Like” button, because you don’t like war crimes.  This has led Facebook users to clamor for an “unlike” button, as a way of promoting stories, but without saying you “like” them.  The same goes for commenting on someone’s status when they are undergoing personal tragedy.  You don’t like the fact that your friend’s house burned down, but you want to use the “Like” button to promote the news on your Facebook Wall to your other friends.

Google fixes this by using a “+1″ button, which is more value-neutral.  It’s just a way of saying, “Me, too” or “Read this”, without saying you like it.  That’s pretty ingenious, I think.

Google has tried several social networking applications over the past few years, and most of them have been unsuccessful.  Some were too advanced and too different-from-the-norm for some users (Google Wave), and some were just launched poorly, leading to lawsuits instead of broad adoption (Google Buzz).

My one caveat about Google+ so far is the way it handles pictures – but it’s the exact same way that pictures are shared all over the internet.  (I just wish it were different.)  What I have to say in Google’s defense, though, is that it tells you exactly what happens with pictures during the sign-up process.  Basically, if you post a picture (or any other content) in Google+ (or Facebook, or anywhere else on the web), it doesn’t matter if you only send the picture to your Circle of friends.  Once your friends can see it, there is nothing to stop them from taking the picture and posting it elsewhere.  This is true everywhere on the internet; once you post a picture where others can view it, you can never stop them from putting it somewhere else, where other people can view it, too. (This is why those stupid pictures of yourself are never a good idea.  You think the picture is only being shared with your ‘friends’, but there’s nothing physically stopping them from posting the picture everywhere.  Remember that adding someone to your list of friends is pretty much the same as inviting them into your home.  Act accordingly.  Lock up the important stuff – the stuff that is not flattering to you, or makes you look unemployable, etc. – and keep it out of their hands.  They are your friends today, but who knows about that friendship down the road.)

Google+ can integrate with your Picasa web albums, which is a photo-sharing service from Google.  So, if you want to share (tasteful) vacation photos in Google+, you can just import the pictures from your Picasa web album.  Or, you can just upload pictures directly in Google+, if you prefer.

I was lucky to land an early invitation to Google+, so I am testing it out.  I will be following its development, and keeping an eye on the news about it.  I hope to do a show-and-tell of the service sometime in the fall.  In the meantime, my library users can feel free to contact me about it directly.  (But please do not ask me for an invitation; I don’t have any more to hand out.)

If you’re interested in a third-party overview of Google+, I recommend checking out the guide at AppStorm.

*As always, this essay represents my personal opinion, and not that of my employer.

[Tech tips] Why filtered RSS feeds are awesome – and how you can make your own

Let’s imagine that you follow some RSS feeds for professional (or personal) reasons.  You have them nicely set up in an RSS reader so that they are not clogging up your inbox. But they’re getting overwhelming.  Maybe you have an RSS feed that is itself an aggregator, which means it picks up content from other RSS feeds.  That can be really convenient for you, since it means that you don’t have to follow feeds from multiple sites.

But it can also be annoying.

One of the RSS feeds I follow has multiple authors, and I find one of the authors to be particularly obnoxious.  I don’t like his posts.  He is, unfortunately, a pompous windbag who writes too much of too little substance.  Sure, I can skip his posts, but I’d much rather not see them at all.

The solution here is simple: I can filter my RSS feeds.  Most RSS readers can’t handle this task, but I found a very simple, free web application that makes it easy.  It’s called Feed Rinse.  You create an account on their site – you’re using LastPass to manage all your logins, right? – and then you add the RSS feed you want to follow to your account.  Then you can tell it to filter results.  In my case, I told it to cut out all the blog posts that started with a particular title, since the feed I filtered always prefaces articles by that one author with a particular title.

Once you save your filter, you’re nearly done.  Now you can copy the URL of your filtered RSS feed and add that to your RSS reader.

You can also combine RSS feeds into a ‘channel’ with filters, which might be helpful in the classroom.  You could pull together a bunch of feeds, add them to a channel, and then tell the filter to only publish posts that include certain terms, such as a geographic location or a person.  (For example, you could pull together news feeds from several world newspapers, and then filter them to only show results including the word “Lebanon”.  This would help you quickly create a source for up-to-date news for discussion in the classroom, without you having to individually hunt for articles to recommend to students!)

The more I think about this, the more I am amazed – and it’s so easy, compared to some other filtering systems you can construct.  So, go experiment.  Have a good time.

[Tech tips] Facebook privacy

I feel like that title is a bit of an oxymoron.

If you have a Facebook account, you probably just accepted the default security settings during the process of opening the account.

That’s not good enough.

You really need to learn how to take control of your account and understand what information is exposed.  I am sure that reading the privacy information on Facebook does not sound like your idea of a good time, but until you are familiar with it, you shouldn’t post anything in your account.  (To get to their privacy information, go to “Account” in the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook page. Choose “Help Center” from the drop-down menu.  In the left column, choose “Browse Help Topics”.  Take a look at the pages dealing with Privacy.)

For a helpful overview on keeping your Facebook information private – including how to display different levels of information to different friends – please head on over to Lifehacker to read this post: http://lifehacker.com/5808175/how-to-keep-people-from-seeing-your-facebook-info.

[Tech tips] [Library lessons] Advanced search tips and tricks

Some days, you sit down in front of your computer and feel like a little kid with a big fat crayon in your hand, when what you really need is a fine point pen.

You want more advanced tools, not a clunky single search box that really doesn’t get you the results you need.

My colleague Dawn Emsellem put together a website of tips and tricks for doing advanced searches, and also for accessing some of the ‘deep web’, especially government resources that don’t appear in Google search results.  I invite you to check it out: Resources and Search Strategies.

I know I’ll be bookmarking this page and returning to it often; I’m also adding it to the “Information” box in right column of this blog’s homepage.  Thanks, Dawn!

[Tech tips] Drowning in information, part II

In my previous post on information management, I covered some general tools that can help you manage passwords, bookmarks, file storage, etc.

Now we’ll dig deeper, and turn to the scholarly information you need to get under control.  There are bibliographical references.  Books.  Articles.  Websites. Massive numbers of PDF files.  Maybe your home-grown system (or lack thereof) is not working for you any longer.  Time to turn to some tools that might help.

Caveat: You do not want to wait until the night before your paper is due to start using these tools.  These are powerful tools, but they have a bit of a learning curve.  Start experimenting with them early, at the very beginning stages of your research.  That way, you will become comfortable with them, and they will work for you, not against you.  I know – spending a few hours of your precious free time figuring out how to use bibliographical management software does not sound like anyone’s idea of a good time. Just put on some tv reruns or fire up your music playlist and mess around with the software. You’ll thank yourself later.

Qiqqa

Qiqqa (pronounced “Quicker”) has many features, but, at its heart, it is a tool for managing PDFs.  Some of us remember when hard drives were smaller, and we had to save documents on external media. When we did that, we probably tried to save them on discs organized by topic.  Now our hard drives are massive, so we save every PDF that comes down the pike.  That’s fine and dandy, until you want to find one of them, especially when they have filenames like G67fbChui8734.pdf. That’s where Qiqqa enters the picture. Watch this video and be amazed.  Qiqqa is a tool for organizing your PDFs, and doing blazingly fast searches on them – whether you have a few dozen or a few thousand. One (of the many!) really awesome features of Qiqqa is that it runs optical character recognition on old PDFs, or PDFs created as scans, so that they are fully searchable.   You can add comments to documents, and those comments are searched when you do a full-text search.  Qiqqa can also be synched between multiple computers, which is great for those of us doing research in the workplace and at home. I just discovered Qiqqa myself, and I am already a convert.  I don’t know how I managed graduate school without it.  (Only drawback?  It’s currently only available for Windows.)

EasyBib (library link) (company website)

The library has an EasyBib premium subscription for our patrons.  EasyBib is a citation tool that can work with APA, Chicago/Turabian, and MLA citation formats. If you’re citing a website, all you have to do is plug in the URL, and it will pull information from the site into your bibliography.  If you want to cite a book, you search for the book in the search box on their page, click on the correct book, and EasyBib creates the citation for you.  Similarly, you can search for articles in their search box, and EasyBib will automatically generate a citation.  Once you have a list of citations ready, EasyBib will export the citation list, in proper format and alphabetical order, right into your Word document. EasyBib is probably the citation manager that is easiest to master, but I find I end up having to edit just about every citation it tries to import.  It also doesn’t have some of the more advanced features available in the other citation managers I’ll mention below.  Verdict?  Great for a short paper.  Not for advanced papers with multiple sources.

RefWorks (library link) (company website)

RefWorks also isn’t free, but the library has a subscription to this too.  RefWorks has a citation tool, but that’s just part of what it does.  Besides producing a bibliography, RefWorks is designed to help you manage references.  Say you are working on several papers at once, each requiring a number of references.  You can create folders inside RefWorks, and store citations in each folder, so you don’t end up with a jumbled list of references.  Even better – you can search the references you have stored.  Even better than that – many articles you add to RefWorks will have an “ArticleLinker” button.  Click on that button, and RefWorks will try to find the article for you again in a database.  (Handy if you lost your copy!)  You can share lists of citations with others, which is great for group projects.  But one of the best features of all is that many of the databases we use in the library – including the catalog – allow you to export information into RefWorks with a few clicks, so you don’t have to type citation information into the RefWorks database. RefWorks also features a tool (“Write-N-Cite”) for creating citations in the body of your paper. The library maintains a help page on using RefWorks.

Zotero

Zotero is a free tool for collecting, organizing, citing, and sharing research sources.  It works through a small program that lives in your browser.  (It currently works with the Firefox browser.) When you enter an item into your list of references, you can attach a file to the citation, which is a really handy way to store PDF copies of articles.  You can also link to webpages in the same way.  There is room for you to write notes for the citation, so you can jot down why you thought the resource was important. Or, maybe you’d like to pull out a few important quotes and keep them in the notes section.  Zotero can search anything that is included in the database you’ve created, so you can search your articles and notes.  (That is so much better than pulling your hair out when you can’t remember where you read that quote that would pull your paper together!)  Zotero can be backed up online so that you can access your Zotero library from anywhere. Zotero is pretty powerful, and if you are embarking on a large research project, you should give it a try.  Check out the video tour here.  Good news: they are working on a desktop version of Zotero that works with Safari and Chrome browsers.

Connotea

Connotea is another free reference manager. It works through a bookmarklet you install in your browser.  (This works in any browser.)  While it has ties to the science community, it is not just for scientists.  One of the benefits of Connotea is that it has a social component to it.  When you search references in your Connotea library, you can search not only your library, but other user libraries as well.  That way, you can find resources that other people are reading, and add them to your own collection.  (You can make references private or just share them with particular users, if you don’t want them available to all Connotea users.)  You can join or start a user group, which allows users to collaborate on research by sharing citations to resources they are reading.  One really fun feature: Connotea supports geotagging.  You can input coordinates that are associated with an article, and then map those coordinates on Google Earth.  The guide to Connotea is here.

Mendeley

Mendeley is another free reference manager, but it is also an academic social network.  (There is also a premium version that is not free, which offers more storage space and other features.)  Mendeley is designed for scientists, but it is not restricted for their use. Mendeley works with some other citation management software packages.  For instance, if you already have a Zotero database of references, you can import that into Mendeley, instead of adding everything from scratch.  The social network aspect of Mendeley was designed to help manage papers written by teams of scientists.  Not only can you create a Group and share references with them, but Group members can also annotate and comment on shared references.  Private groups can be created so that you can share paper drafts and other private communication with select users.  Mendeley also offers tools for following research trends, and for amassing statistics on the use of your articles.  The Getting Started Guide is here.

Aigaion

Aigaion is another free citation manager; what sets it apart is its ability to structure information via topic trees. As with most of the other programs mentioned here, Aigaion  – which is named for a hundred-handed monster in The Iliad – allows you to create references, add notes, and save attachments to references.  It also allows you to share your citations with others.  It works on most platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux).  One of the things I really like about it is that it has a very simple interface.  No logos everywhere to distract you.  No unnecessary tabs and buttons.  Just a simple page that lists the information that will appear in your citation.  I think a lot can be said for the minimalist approach, when you need to sit down and write.  Stop with the eye candy and just get on with it!

Here are two other tools that might help you when you are working on a paper:

Focus booster

Focus booster is a free program you can run online or download onto your computer.  It is a very simple timer.  It is preset to run for 25 minutes, and then five minutes: that’s 25 minutes of work, with a five minute break.  And then, when you get through four cycles of that, you can take a longer break of 15-20 minutes.  It’s great for forcing yourself to just do some work already.  You’ve researched everything.  You’ve got all the information you need.  It’s time to get to work – and this might be just the tool to help you do it.  The timer shows a progress bar across the bottom, so you have a visual cue of how much longer you need to concentrate, or how much longer you have on your break.

Q10, FocusWriter, and OmmWriter

You need to write.  But every time you use Word, you get distracted by the features.  The bullet points.  The fonts.  The grammar checker.  Indents that never land right where they should. You write three sentences, and then you spend 25 minutes making them look just perfect.

Give it a rest already.  Just write.  (Write First. Format Later.) Q10 and FocusWriter are simple text editors.  They take up your whole screen, so you can’t be distracted by things happening in your toolbar.  They count words as you type.  Q10 has an alarm, if you want to set a timer on a writing session.  FocusWriter counts how many minutes you’ve typed in a day, if you want to set a daily goal. They are free and simple.  Q10 works on Windows; FocusWriter works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

If you want a simple text editor, but with a comforting color palette and some ambient music to calm your soul, there’s OmmWriter.

[Tech tips] Drowning in information

As the semester gets into full swing, you may start to feel overwhelmed with all the information you have to manage in your life.  Here are a few of my favorite applications for wrangling information.

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to ‘the cloud’.

[Please read this statement about the privacy of student data and other protected information, if you are going to use any of these applications in a university setting.]

LastPass

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got about 152 usernames and passwords, plus library barcodes and all sorts of data that I want to keep secure, but want to be able to access at any time. LastPass is a browser add-on that keeps track of all that stuff, and it offers many other tools as well, including a password generator.  You use one master password to manage your  ‘vault’ of information.  Even better – you can login to your vault on the internet, so if you’re not at your own computer, you can still get to your passwords. The best part, though, is that LastPass will log you into sites once you have stored your username and password in the vault.  You won’t have to type them again and again. I don’t know how I lived without this.  (Well, I do.  By using bad passwords and by *gasp* writing some of them down.)

Evernote

Drop what you’re doing right now and sign up for Evernote.  This is a notetaking application that can both live on the web and on your computer.  It even gives you a bookmarklet for your browser so you can ‘clip’ parts of webpages and add them to your Evernote stash.  You can create separate notebooks to organize your notes, and add tags to individual notes as well.  Besides the clipping feature, it offers you a basic text editor so that you can write notes.  You can take photos with your phone and add them to Evernote.  You can email stuff to your Evernote notebooks.  This isn’t just for serious use, either.  I often clip recipes into a cooking notebook, or save craft project ideas I find online. 

Laytr

Do you wish that someone could send you an email to remind you to do something, but you want it sent next week?  Or three days from now?  Or next October 14^th, at 3:30pm? You can do that.  It’s called Laytr.  You sign up on their website, and then you send emails to Laytr, using special email addresses they provide on their website.  Laytr processes the email from you and sends it back to you at the date/time you specified in the address.  It’s really easy to use, since it’s just a matter of sending an email – which you already know how to do.

DropBox

[Edited 07/26/2011: Want something more secure than DropBox?  Try SpiderOak.]

If you are not using DropBox, you are missing out on something really good.  This is an online file storage system.  You download a small program to your hard drive, and it creates a folder on your hard drive.  Everything you put in that folder is automatically synced to a backup copy online.  Also, if you’re not using your computer, you can login to your DropBox online and access your files.  They give you several gigabytes of storage for free, but you can pay for more, if you need it.  This service offers you the peace of mind of knowing that whatever it is you are working on, there is not only the copy on your hard drive, but there is a copy backed up somewhere else, somewhere where you can’t spill coffee on it and short circuit it.

WindowsSkyDrive

This is a service that is very similar to DropBox, but it comes with even more perks – the ability to edit some Office documents online.  Again, you don’t have to be sitting at your computer – you can edit that Word document no matter where you are – even if the computer you are using does not have Microsoft Office on it.  The online versions of Office programs in SkyDrive are not as full-featured as the Office programs you have on your hard drive, but they can do quite a bit.

URL shorteners

Bit.ly is one of the many URL shorteners out there.  Tiny.cc is another one. Of course, there is also goo.gl.  If you have to share a URL with someone, why give them one that wraps around three lines of text, and is impossible to re-type?  Make it shorter!  You just go to the site and enter the URL, and it creates a short version of the URL for you.

Stellarium

This has nothing to do with ‘the cloud’, but everything to do with the sky.  Stellarium is not productivity software.  It will not make your life easier or more organized.  But maybe it will provide the mental break you need.  It’s a free software package for gazing at the stars – a planetarium on your desktop.  It is created and supported by several of the leading observatories in the world.  I like the fact that you can speed ahead to a future date to look at the sky – so if you’re camping next Saturday, you can find out what will be on the horizon before you go.  It also can show you the constellations, their labels, and their artwork.  It’s free, it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it is awesome.

You’re welcome.

[13 May 2011 - Edited to remove information about Xmarks. I use to love Xmarks - it synched my bookmarks across multiple computers AND multiple web browsers - but then it just got buggy and it ate all my bookmarks.  I really can't recommend it any longer.  Hopefully, they'll get it fixed in the future.  In the meantime, I'm sticking with Firefox Sync, which is built-in to the newer Firefox browsers, and can even work with your smartphone.]

If you’ve read this far, maybe you want more.  Here’s a really interesting article about “information overload”:  Blair, Ann, “Reading strategies for coping with information overload, ca. 1550-1700,” Journal of the history of ideas 64 (2003): 11-28.