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Case Study
– Stephen Meyer, MIT Faculty Member |
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Background |
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Prof. Stephen Meyer is a faculty member in the Political Science
department of MIT, specializing in environmental policy issues.
In the course of his research he regularly uses databases such
as Lexis-Nexis; the World of Science; Social Science Abstracts;
Citation Abstracts, and others. In addition, he has access to a
huge electronic library including thousands of journals. |
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The Problems: |
1. Organizing disparate material
The end product of a typical research project was a huge number
of files in every conceivable format – html, pdf, any flavor of
Word, Excel files, database records, and Tex files (the standard
academic/ technical word processing format). Professor Meyer
found it almost impossible to organize all this disparate
material coherently.
2. Accessing previously-saved material
Professor Meyer frequently needed to re-read research material
saved at an earlier date – but where exactly had he put it? “My
problem”, he says, “was always going back and finding things I’d
culled before.”
3. Time wasted on technicalities
Professor Meyer was spending too much time on brute-force
processing. “I’d copy things to Word,” he explains, “possibly
save them later as a PDF. Most selections had to be reformatted,
and the result didn’t really represent the original; and I had
to insert the graphical material separately. Then there was the
problem of deleting unwanted material, such as ads; and how to
integrate supplementary material, such as sidebars from
articles. The whole process was highly inefficient.” |
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The Solution: Net Snippets |
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Professor Meyer researches all his articles himself, and doesn’t
usually collaborate with others, or send out professional
reports. He was looking for a tool that would help him organize
and manage a huge, private information resource. He chose the
Personal edition. |
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The Results |
1. Quick, efficient organization of research materials
”I really couldn’t have written my last article – a review of
human impact on ecosystems worldwide, including an examination
of many different environments – without this tool,” Professor
Meyer explains. “I found myself using it as a meta-analyusis
tool.” He especially likes the ability to save materials from
any format in large, deep hierarchies of folders.
2. Added value on-the-fly
The ability to add comments and keywords turned an amorphous
group of disparate files into a meaningful collection. These
commenting and keywording features of Net Snippets, Professor
Meyer emphasizes, “are especially why I think this tool is
important.”
3. Easy retrieval of previously-saved material
-- based on the keywords assigned to each snippet when saving
it. Professor Meyer especially enjoys the ability to call up
material six or twelve months later, “almost without having to
look for it.”
4. A huge saving of time and increase in productivity
”With Net Snippets it takes me minutes to do things that used to
take me hours,” says Professor Meyer. “It’s like having a
personal research assistant.” A recent project involved saving
snippets from a massive number of medical journals – abstracts,
graphs, tables, diagrams and graphics – and keywording them for
later recall. “There’s no way,” Professor Meyer adds, “that I
could have filed all that disparate material without Net
Snippets.” |
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Unforeseen bonuses: |
1. Automatic source recording
Professor Meyer especially appreciates Net Snippets’ ability to
take him back to the original document, months later, with a
single click on the automatically-recorded source URL.2. The freedom from “housekeeping”
- never having to worry about whether he’d remembered to quote
the source and whether he’d copied the URL correctly.
3. Easy learning curve
”It’s so intuitive,” Professor Meyer explains. “I heard about it
from a newspaper article, tried it out, and it was so easy that
I just bought it.” |
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