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Case Study
– Pal-Espen Torisen, Professional Recruiter and Researcher |
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Business Background |
Mr. Pal-Espen Torisen operates a recruitment agency (http://www.get-a-head.com).
As an integral part of his business, he does extensive candidate
research. He also writes professional books on recruiting and
job searching, for which he does a great deal of background
research. Currently, for instance, he is working on a study of
human capital as part of a firm’s general intellectual capital
and intangible assets.
Mr. Torisen uses search engines and the meta-search tool,
Copernic, to search both the open Web, and many deep-web
databases and electronic journals and conferences. |
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The Problems: |
1. Organizing disparate material
Much of the remote material Mr. Torisen found was in PDF
format, followed by web pages and Office documents; but he also
wanted to amalgamate into his research collection information
from e-mail messages, web forums, and local material, especially
PDF files he had written himself.
2. Returning to previously-found material
Mr. Torisen likes to save book citations from Amazon, and
periodically return to the book on the Amazon site and check
reader reviews. Similarly, he notes, “many of the works that
interest me have extensive sections of text available for
searching on the Amazon site.” But a simple bookmark wasn’t
enough, because when updating his research material for a
particular book, he needed to see all the material already
retrieved in order not to waste time duplicating it.
3. The shortcomings of other solutions
Mr. Torisen had tried many other post-search
information-management programs, including SurfSaver, iHarvest,
and Onfolio, but found them either too simple for his needs, or
too inflexible, or slower, or not well maintained. Often he used
a specialized tool for one particular function, such as a
screen-capture program that would let him save partial screens,
or capture a whole document, not just what was visible
on-screen. He also used MineManager to map an outline structure
and then add text to the skeleton; but it was not specifically
made for the functions he needed, took a long time and did not
enable him to produce professional reports. The need to use
several programs resulted in search results being saved in
different locations, and sometimes in proprietary formats. The
latter point especially worried him: “when a solution uses a
proprietary format, if that solution goes out of business you’ve
lost your database.” |
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The Solution: Net Snippets |
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Mr. Torisen does all his research personally and, being a
one-man company, does not usually need to collaborate with
colleagues. But he wanted to create reports as a way to easily
archive, and burn to a CD, huge research projects containing
hundreds of items. In addition, he did often need to send out
simpler reports such as a short-list of candidates. He chose the
Professional edition. |
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The Results |
1. A one-stop solution to all post-processing needs
”Any form the text is in,” Mr. Torisen explains, “I can include
it; including offline (i.e., locally-saved) sources; even a raw
screen dump. This flexibility was one of the reasons I decided
to use Net Snippets.” He can save entire documents, selections,
or full or partial screen-captures, and organize the structure
of all the material, without needing to use an additional
program.
2. Addition of metadata
Mr. Torisen regards the ability to add an abstract and comments
to a snippet as “one of the best things in Net Snippets – and
lacking if you save things directly, rather than via Net
Snippets.”
3. Easy editing of saved material while-you-work
”I set the program to AutoEdit,” Mr. Torisen says, “and it
automatically strips the original formatting and deletes
advertisements.” In addition, he can edit the snippet, rearrange
sections, and add emphasis such as boldfacing and highlighting,
while saving the extract or at any time thereafter.
4. Open-source format
All material is saved directly to disk, via the operating
system’s file structure, in standard formats. Mr. Torisen no
longer has to worry about losing his data if he and the program
part company, or about being unable to access it from other
programs: it’s always available.
5. Report, index and bibliography generation
Mr. Torisen especially likes the format of Net Snippets’
reports. “They are much more professional than any of the
competitors,” he says. “The others that I tried didn’t have the
same flexibility, some couldn’t even edit or delete.” |
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Unforeseen bonuses: |
1. Frequent updating
”I was very happy to see what frequent upgrades there are,”
Mr. Torisen says. “I upgraded to the new version as soon as it
came out.” He appreciates the company’s sincere commitment to
enhancing functionality and ensuring that Net Snippets remains
the best product available.
2. The standing of other customers
The fact that Net Snippets has many serious academic
customers, Mr. Torisen notes, is a de facto endorsement of the
quality of their product.
3. Integration with desktop search programs
”I index all my snippets via Copernic,” Mr. Torisen
explains. “The search capability of a post-processing solution
like Net Snippets can’t compete with a dedicated search program;
but since everything is in open-source format and visible to
desktop search programs such as Copernic, it doesn’t have to.
They integrate nicely together.” This is of course equally true
for any of Copernic’s competitors, such as Google’s new desktop
search program. |
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