Tools & Techniques for Archival Research

Tools I recommend

  • Zotero (for note taking and citation management)
  • Jotnot (for scanning docs)
  • Adobe Acrobat DC/ Pro (PDF OCR and manipulation)
  • Dropbox or Box (for cloud storage)

Text Extraction Software

OCR Conversion

OCR (Optical Text Recognition) can convert your images to text if they are in a type format. This can be very useful for searching your documents. But OCR will not work on handwriting, so it is not always useful.

Use the tools you know and love

If you love Evernote or Devonthink or Google docs, go ahead and find a workflow that uses them. I prefer to recommend free and non-commercial products if I can, but if you are already committed to a product, keep using it.