So you take lots of notes—you write summaries and compile indices, focusing on your most important topics of interest, diligently maintaining the usefulness of your literary diet. But then you face this problem: how best do you compile all the notes you have taken in some form that is easily accessible and easily navigable? It makes sense at this point for you to turn to computers. To ignore the archiving possibilities of these machines would, frankly, be academically irresponsible.

I have a friend (that’s you, Jamin) who manages his very well-organized notes simply by compiling them all on text documents and then utilizing the google desktop search to pull them up at will by keyword. This works very well for him, and fits his style of note-taking. But personally I prefer to use a piece of reference management software like JabRef or EndNote. I prefer these programs for the following reasons: they connect with my word processor to allow for extremely speedy insertion of citations and for automatic bibliography creation; they allow me to compile my entire bibliography of all annotated resources in one file, making everything much tidier; they do the work of formatting for me, whether my required style is MLA, Chicago, Turabian, or APA; they are designed to accommodate precisely my two styles of note-taking (summaries and indices) with the minimum amount of effort.

The two “industry-standard” (if scholarship is an industry) programs are EndNote and JabRef. JabRef is immediately more appealing because it’s free. But it has a less attractive interface, and, in my opinion, a slightly higher learning curve that EndNote. If you use Word, JabRef takes some complicated set-up to integrate properly with that word processor. But it’s freeware which is good to support on principle. EndNote—which I use, simply because I was given a copy some time ago and have been using it to the degree that I don’t want to change (at the moment)—is *not* free (unless someone give it to you, as in my case). In fact it’s rather expensive. However, you’re paying for a very attractive and intuitive interface with immediate, no-sweat integration with Word.

Either way, for anyone with their eyes on a life of scholarship, organizing the electronic storage of notes couldn’t be managed better (I think) than via one of these programs.

For mac users: see Eric’s comment below for a suggested alternative to JabRef or EndNote.