Online Research Toolkit

Did you know that Google Scholar can link into subscription databases, allowing you to use it as a federated search for databases like JSTOR and Science Direct? That you can import citations into Refworks or Endnote?

Just click the little Scholar Preferences link to the right of the search box. From there, you can change your language, add a library for full text subscriptions, change the results display, and choose a citation manager.

And don’t forget to check the Advanced Search as well. Advanced search allows you limit by subject (such as “Biology, Life Sciences, and Environmental Science”), which is really handy when you are searching for keywords that are used differently in different fields.

We don’t live entirely online. There are times when you have a offline “document” that you need to get online, and there is no scanner available or it’s something that isn’t scannable. Whiteboard notes come to mind. You can take a picture, but you generally then have to spend some time adjusting the contrast and color, cropping the image, etc., before you can use the notes.

There are a couple of services that help do some of this automatically and give you a place to store and share the images. Scanr works with cameras, including camera phones, that take at least 1 megapixel images (that’s most newer phones and nearly all digital cameras). Quipit has similar requirements. In both cases, you take a picture of the whiteboard, handwritten/drawn document, or typed document, and send it to the service. They process the picture to increase the contrast, remove shadows and camera artifacts (like flash glare), and crop the background out, and provide a link or account where you can download, share, email, or fax your image as a PDF document. Registration for both requires an email address, and agreement to the terms of service, which are fairly standard.

For the most part, a standard 1 megapixel shot in either service will do nicely for a whiteboard or for handwritten notes, but not for typed documents. Both services have lists of phones that work for whiteboard, notes, or typed documents, so you can easily check if your camera phone will work. Lighting and careful photography are still important, no matter how good the image processing, so both services provide tips for improving your images.

Both Scanr and Quipit have Facebook applications for sharing classnotes. Quipit allows you to post documents to a blog. Quipit works in color or black & white, while Scanr says it is dedicated to high quality black & white images. Both services have tagging and searching.

Security is based on passwords and both services have SSL security for login, however transmission is not necessarily encrypted. You are sending images from your camera phone via the text messaging system, or from your computer via email, and neither service has control over that part of the system. So use care if you have proprietary or personal data.

So the next time you have been scribbling on a napkin, or brainstorming on a whiteboard, get out that camera phone and give one of these a try.