Paperless, Part I

By hook or by crook, by laptop or by handheld, I'm going paperless.  

At the outset of my third year of doctoral studies, I get knots in my stomach when I look at the accumulation of books flagged with sticky notes and the crates of binders overloaded with highlighted articles, conference papers, and research studies. 

So, paperless academic reading is my latest "new routine." But I'm taking baby steps, starting with one class. This summer in EP604, I will not print a single page of the assigned journal articles or book chapters  -- not one page of the 521 pages of required reading. (That's more than a ream of single-sided copies.)

Instead, I am downloading the digital files from our course website into an application for reading and annotating PDFs. Then, I am "flattening" and exporting the marked-up PDFs to my virtual library, which, for the moment, is housed at Mendeley.com. (See also my post Working with Mendeley.) Mendeley is a web-based personal citation and reference manager that enables users to store their research documents on remote servers, or "in the cloud."  That means I can access my personal collection of EP604 course readings anytime, anywhere, provided I have a reliable Internet connection and web browser.

Let's be honest here.  Cloud computing may sound all warm and fuzzy and environmentally conscious.  But this is not about saving trees. For me, at least, it's about saving my sanity.

Anyone (read:  "any sleep-deprived graduate student") who has desperately thumbed through stacks of paper at 2 a.m., searching for that singular, seminal piece of writing -- that 37-page, heavily annotated and many-times-read journal article -- only to realize she has left the printout on her desk at school, can understand the value of the "cloud."

Managing one's resources in graduate school has surely never been easy. Now, ironically, digital and web-based technologies provide greater ease and efficiency with which to gather mass amounts of information, while making it more difficult to stay organized. According to Anderson and Kanuka, authors of E-Research: Methods, Strategies and Issues, "...[T]he amount of valuable research information available 'anywhere/anytime' continues to grow," and more time is needed for "assessing relevance and veracity" (2003, pp. 41-42).

When one factors in Hart's assertion that the graduate student "is expected to search more widely, across disciplines, and in greater detail than at undergraduate level" (1999, p. 9), there is major imperative for adopting and refining the practice of reading in digital and online environments.

In sum, my tools for converting to paperless are (so far): 

• citation management software (Mendeley is one example, but I would like to compare it later to Zotero.)
• a PDF annotator
• Dropbox.com

What other tools might I consider?  And, more importantly, what is the value-added of going paperless and what are the costs?  I will explore these questions in future posts.

Paperless, Part I