Skip to Navigation
University of Pittsburgh
Print This Page Print this pages

October 14, 2010

Buried in paper? E-tips for cutting your paper silo

Health Sciences Library System reference and information technology librarian Patricia Weiss initially may have disappointed attendees at her recent talk, “Making a Dent in Your Personal Paper Silo.” papers,desk

“I can’t help you with the paper that’s already accumulated in your life,” she told those interested in lightening their paper overload burdens.

“My children are now 32 and 29 and I’m still going through their grade school papers. So, I’m not a real good role model for that,” she admitted. However, in a recent Lunch with a Librarian talk, Weiss outlined several tools that can help prevent needless accumulation of additional paper.

Going entirely paperless may not be possible — in part because, for some purposes, paper is superior to electronic information. It’s interactive, portable and notations can be made easily on paper. “Paper is friendly. It’s warmer than electronic information. You can curl up with it,” she added. However, electronic information can be accessed from anywhere and is searchable, sharable and can be linked to or linked from.

Levels of need

Categorizing the information is a first step in determining how to store it. Highest on the priority list is information needed now for a specific project that’s underway, she said. Next in the hierarchy are things to be read because they’re important, followed by things to be read because they’re interesting.

Lower on the scale are background materials or things that may be needed eventually. At the bottom of the need pile are things you hold onto “just because.”

Basic principles

Weiss advised her audience to adopt several basic principles when devising a strategy for minimizing accumulations of paper.

Cut the problem off at the printer. “Just don’t print it. Think of other ways you can capture this information if you don’t need it right now,” she said.

Think of how you will use the item. “There are more information streams, but also more tools to manage them,” she said.

Use the web. “See how much you can do with just the web. You can get to the web from about anywhere and that’s the great thing about it,” she said.

Store web addresses (URLs) rather than printing PDF files. “You can still keep the information and have it in some way, but you’re not generating all the paper,” Weiss said.

Storage

Weiss categorizes storage solutions into four types. Ranging from the most general use to the more academic-specific, they are:

• Ubiquitrons

These, Weiss said, offer instant access to electronic files from anywhere.

In the pre-web past, file transfer protocol (FTP) was used to move files around. Then physical devices such as floppy drives, zip drives, CDs and flash drives evolved. Today, the move is toward cloud computing in which information is stored on the web. “People have done this for years with free email programs like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. Now we’re starting to see it for other purposes too,” Weiss said.

Newer tools such as Dropbox, Evernote and Box enable files to be stored on the web. For example, Weiss uses Dropbox, which bills itself as a “magic pocket” for electronic data. She has it on her phone as well as on her iPod and home computer. Using Dropbox, she has access to her folders regardless of which device she is using.

Weiss also noted that Pitt email users who send large files to themselves quickly can consume a large amount of their quota space, reducing their capacity to receive messages. “I don’t email files to myself as much as I used to. [Dropbox] is very convenient,” she said, adding that this sort of storage is a great tool for getting started on eliminating the paper silo.

The downside, Weiss said, is that these free services often don’t update files instantaneously and the capacity is limited. “It’s not a place to put things permanently,” she said, adding that such tools provide a good spot for information that’s in transition or for information that might be needed only a few times.

Bookmarks are another ubiquitron Weiss favors. Browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer all have toolbar features that place favorite information on the computer desktop.

“The good thing about it is it turns your favorite bookmarks into buttons so they’re right in front of you when you need them,” she said. In addition, bookmark synchronizers such as Firefox Sync, or tools specific to other browsers, give users the timesaving advantage of having the same toolbar on multiple devices.

Firefox Sync, Weiss noted, also will keep track of passwords and tabs. “If I have tabs open in Firefox when I leave the office, I can go home and find the same tabs and continue what I was doing,” she said.

• Inboxes

Delicious is the best known of the social s applications. “What it does is keeps track of web sites that you like,” Weiss said, describing it as “letting you remember things in public.”

Users mark items with “tags” and when others search on a particular term, results include the items that other users have tagged with that same term.

“As a librarian I use it all the time because if I’m collecting things to do a presentation or I want a patron to see some things I found, I can just email them a URL and it’s very convenient,” Weiss said.

Although some items can be marked as private, the point of Delicious is sharing your bookmarks with others. “The way you contribute to the system is to put your stuff out there,” she said.

“This is really convenient even in your private life,” she said, recounting how she and her siblings in different cities were trying to come up with a joint birthday present for their father. “Some had some suggestions, so I went out and looked for the items, created a set of Delicious bookmarks and emailed it to everybody. They chose the item and that was it.”

RSS feed readers (also known as syndicators or aggregators) such as Google Reader, Netvibes or Bloglines allow users to create electronic clip files of favorite feeds to which they subscribe.

Some web pages feature an orange RSS feed icon, or other indicator that links to one or more feeds to which users can subscribe. “Click on the one you want and add it directly to your reader to get a subscription to that feed,” she said. For instance, The New England Journal of Medicine offers two dozen RSS choices including feeds for the current issue as well as for specialties such as cardiology and pediatrics.

“I like this because I generally would get things in my email inbox and they would just sit there because email is dealing with messages, corresponding with people,” Weiss said. “Only sometimes would I set aside the time to go through my journals.”

Weiss said that although using a feed reader takes some forethought — you have to decide what you want to receive and read — she prefers having a separate space for such information.

“To me this is a better place than saving clippings in email because I have so much stuff in my email,” she said. “If you don’t go to it that often, it may accumulate but at some point you can go and see it and everything will be right there.”

• Gimmes

“Gimme” tools save time by allowing users to grab information directly. One example is Pubget’s “PaperPlane” tool that delivers instant PDF files from certain journal publications.

Originally designed to grab full text PDFs from the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed archive, PaperPlane has expanded to cover other major publishers as well, Weiss said.

• Citation management lite

Weiss categorizes some basic citation management tools as “lite” tools.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information’s My NCBI (formerly the PubMed Cubby) is a web-based tool that enables users to save searches or collections of information. “This is very useful simply because it is ubiquitously available,” she said.

Scientific publisher Springer’s CiteULike is another example. More social than other citation management tools such as Endnote or Refworks, “You tag the things you save and you can get into other people’s things through their tags too,” she said. “You can see what other people are reading and what they’ve suggested. If you find someone who has a lot of the same type of articles as you, you can look at their library.”

Other considerations

“Paper is useful, so we know we’re going to keep using paper,” Weiss said. “The solution is not to use less, but to keep less. Sometimes you really need to pile things up, but when you’re done with that, is there some way of keeping track of what you piled up without keeping the pile itself?”

To prevent pileups, Weiss said she likes to think in terms of “just-in-time paper.” “When I need something, I print it out. When I’m done with the printout, I discard it. Is that wasteful? Probably in some ways, in other ways probably not.”

She also recommends a “training wheels” approach to weaning off of paper. “I just print out the first page of something so I keep track of the citation and I’ll have it if I need it.”

In conclusion, she cautioned against creating other kinds of silos that can be caused by storing large numbers of PDFs. Electronic libraries can become hard to manipulate and manage if they grow too big.

“I understand people want instant access to it. But the problem is everybody’s creating their own silo of PDFs.”

Saving URLs rather than PDFs is one way to combat the large file sizes, but the practice isn’t foolproof because URLs sometimes change. Saving Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) — permanent names for digital content that include information on where the object can be found — can be a better option for long-term storage because DOIs are updated, noted one participant who said he has given up on storing the sometimes-changeable URLs.

“The problem is not entirely solved,” Weiss admitted.

Links to tools, including those mentioned in Weiss’s presentation, are available at http://bit.ly/papersilo.

—Kimberly K. Barlow

Filed under: Feature,Volume 43 Issue 4

Leave a Reply