One annotated research location to rule them all

I am currently doing some research for the EDUI 6706 class I’m taking at Cal State East Bay, and it involves finding lots of articles. I normally print these out, but that’s seeming excessively wasteful (though convenient for transport).

I had searched previously for a solution to stashing pdf’s with my own annotations (many articles download as pdf). I already use Diigo for stashing and annotating web pages, but it won’t do pdfs. The Google/Diigo workaround I tried in July basically sucked, and the Evernote solution was too time consuming and, frankly, inelegant. But in a comment to that Evernote post,  Ron Houtman recommended Crocodoc. (Another colleague of mine, Robert Kelley, had recommended it for annotating a document collaboratively, so somehow it had gotten in my head that’s what it was for.)

So in total desperation after looking at a stack of manually highlighted paper packets and a mishmash of conveniently annotated research bookmarks in Diigo, I tried Crocodoc. It has its own annotation system, of course, but that’s OK. Here’s what I do.

I find the article I want, and it downloads in pdf. I then upload it to Crocodoc, changing the title so I know what it is (research articles often download with helpful file names like 2892586.pdf).
Then I click on it. But instead of using Crocodoc’s annotation tools, I use my Diigolet and bookmark it. This bookmarks the crocodoc version of the pdf file. I then use Diigo’s tools to annotate.
When I’m done, the highlighted passages show up conveniently in Diigo as my annotations, where I can copy and paste into my work.

As you can see, though, the only problem is the size of the annotated text in Diigo. If you use Diigo’s annotation tool, it comes out super big. If you use Crocodoc’s tool, it comes out normal size. Crocodoc’s tool is dicier, though — it doesn’t always hold the highlight in Diigo.

But still, now all the research stuff is in one place. Huzzah!