Previously, I discussed the Capture part of KM (Knowledge Management) as shown in the image above. Go read that if you are confused by this second part in the series!
Manage
The way I manage information that I consume requires some fiddling and connections between apps to make it all work, but if you throw some money at it, it’s pretty easy (there are likely other options that are cheaper but not so easy to put together – I’ll leave finding those as an exercise for the reader – but my hint is to check out IFTTT and Zapier for connection help).
Zotero, a citation management application that is blessedly free, unlike so many of the tools covered in these articles, is a way to collect and organize and (most importantly for a librarian) cite your sources as you come across information you may want to use. There are other options out there, Mendeley is one, but Zotero has ways to interact with Roam and other tech that I use, so I prefer that one. As I come across sources, whether they are PDFs from online journal indexes and databases or books that I save to my Goodreads account (and I don’t even count that as part of my tech stack, though I probably should) or blog posts that I’m going to want to cite someday, I save them to my Zotero library for safekeeping. I can then use Zotero to read and highlight PDFs in a way that makes it easy-ish to get those annotations into Roam or Obsidian or Evernote and Zotero/Roam have a connection that allows me to search my Zotero library from within Roam to connect a source to some information or content that is relevant.
Skipping down to Hypothes.is (misspelled on the image above, I know, but I won’t tell if you don’t) – this is a browser-based service that lets you read PDFs in the browser, take annotations and highlights from those PDFs and shoots them over to Readwise.
Readwise.io is a service that has a LOT of uses. I use it for a couple of things, myself. I do a daily review of all of the highlights I’ve made in the past through Instapaper, my Kindle eReader (also not explicitly part of my tech stack, though it should be too), and Hypothes.is. I have it set to surface 5 highlights I’ve made in the past for me to read through and this helps me remember what I’ve read and thought interesting in the past. It also does a sweep each night of all of my highlights from each of the capturing services mentioned above and dumps them into my daily note in Roam for me to find later. I am still working on tweaking those highlights so that they are useful for me in Roam and that is pretty easy to do with the Readwise templating system.
Next up will be the Connect verb in the KM environment – stay tuned!
Part 1 – Capture | Part 2 – Manage | Part 3 – Connect | Part 4 – Enhance | Part 5 – Find | Part 6 – Create
