 Hello everybody. Thank you for joining us for a workshop on how to use power notes with UT libraries. Today we're going to be going over what this tool is, how to download and use it, and some of our favorite tips and tricks. So my name is Carissa Powell. I use she, her, her pronouns in the library. I am a student success librarian for information literacy. If you are in English 101, 102, any of the first year comp classes. I am your go-to person and my email is Carissa at utk.edu. And my name is Leah Valletta. I use she, her, her pronouns as well, and I am a GTA in the teaching and learning department here in the Hodges Library. All right. So to get started, we're just going to start at the beginning with what exactly is power notes. So power notes is a research tool that sort of helps you organize your notes in a browser. So it is a browser plugin that you will download onto your browser where it will live. And it can be used at any time for you to kind of gather little snippets and quotes from your text. And then it will save them so you can look at those little snippets that were saved from your text later. And you can kind of make sense of them that way. It'll make a little more sense when Carissa shows it to you. So basically you can highlight anything, any text or images that you're looking at, you can save them to a project. And then later you can add notes to the snippets that you've highlighted, kind of as you go. So basically it will allow you to create an outline when you save things. So you'll have different projects you can work on. And then you can have different topics within those projects where you can save specific quotes or specific parts of articles or books or whatever you're looking at on your computer. And then Power Notes will sort of organize the projects and the topics hierarchically so you can actually have Power Notes, take all of that research and put it into an outline that you can look at later. So Carissa now is going to go ahead and give us a little bit of information on how to download the browser plugin. And then she's going to show you what it looks like when you highlight these little snippets as I'm calling them and quotes and then kind of how to organize them once you've saved them to Power Notes in your browser. Thank you, Leah. I love calling these snippets. So these are the seven-ish steps to walk through downloading the extension and signing up for an account. We will link out in a different document the specific links to anything we talk about today. Again, this is a Google Chrome or Firefox extension. Power Notes is working on making it more accessible on other platforms, but those are the two we're working with right now. So the first step would be to open a browser in one of those two platforms and go to powernotes.com. You would then follow the instructions to download the extension, follow the prompts to create an account. The really important thing to note here is that while anyone can create a really basic account for free, you want to use your UTK email address to get a premium account. So just make sure you sign up with your UTK email address. You should then get a verification link in your email and then you should be all set to go. So I'm going to walk us through some of those steps once you have it downloaded. So it should look something like this. This is powernotes.com. This is me signed in. You can see that I have a lot of different projects. And so the one we'll be working on today is we're going to be pretending like we're researching peanut butter. And so I've already done a little bit of background research, but I'm going to walk us through the steps of how to use it today. So if we're starting out from scratch, I would go to lib.utk.edu. This is our library's home page. If you've never been here today, welcome. I hope it becomes a useful tool for you and a great good place to go first. OneSearch is a tool to look for books, articles, a variety of different information sources. And I'm going to type in my topic. You can type in whatever you are researching and then hit submit. And we will come to a page that looks like this. We will have a future workshop specifically on how to use OneSearch. So again, this is a pretty basic overview of how to use powernotes. If you're wanting an overview of how to use OneSearch, come to another workshop. From here, I can look through my results. See if there's anything fascinating. I'm really taken by this multi-state breakout. So I'm going to click on that title. So from here, I would then try to access this article online by one of these links. So we're going to try out our first link, see what happens. And it's loading, which is very natural. From here, you will see that powernotes is enabled because it is yellow in the top right-hand corner of the page. If I'm ever browsing and I don't want to use powernotes, I can disable it and it'll turn gray or turn it back on and it'll turn yellow. Powernotes will also show up in the bottom right corner of the page with this icon and you can switch to see which of your projects you want up. So I've got our peanut butter project up. As I'm reading this article, I would use powernotes to highlight and annotate anything that I want to save for when I start to write my paper. So maybe I'm really interested in this outbreak that happened in 2009. So I'm going to highlight that. This will pop up over here and I can add it to my salmonella tab. Here I could take some notes about this breakout and then hit save. And so now when I come over to my powernotes outline, it will be there with my notes saved. A little trick is that you can take your citation from your article and this is a big note that these are all computer-generated citations and you are smarter than a computer, so always double-check your citation. And so the next time that I take another note and add it to salmonella, this little quotation, little thing, you can double-check your citation on the side and then I could fill in any of this information. So I can see that these are the authors here, so I could copy and paste them over to the author information. And I could add that this was published in February 6, 2009. I don't think it liked the format. I put that in, but that's okay. So then I would hit save and that would be updated in my outline. So this would be a much longer process. You would do this for all of the articles you're reading for a paper and so I'm going to pretend that I have now read a ton of articles for my paper on peanut butter and salmonella and I now want to look at my whole outline that I have created. So this is now on PowerNotes.com and you can see that I have one tab on background and then I have four things that fall under salmonella. You can move these around. I can redo the order that my note cards are in. I can add comments about what I wrote about the article. You can also add a blank note card like maybe you have a really brilliant opening line to your paragraph for this paper and you just want to put that here. And really you can add multiple topics. Maybe I need a topic about my conclusion paragraph and I want that to be, I don't know what shade that is, but I could make it that shade and then add that. And so you can just go really wild with your topics. So once you've got your outline, you can also share it with someone else. So maybe you are writing a group paper and you're wanting to have input from your other group members so you can make them an editor, put their email address in there and send them an invite. You can also share it with your professor. Maybe they are wanting to see and help you with your research so you can add them as well. So now it's time to actually write your paper and we would want to export this. So I can click this button and you could either download it as a Word document or an Excel file. Both of them are up to you. And then once you download that, you could start writing your paper with the information you downloaded. So that is a really quick overview of how to use it and Leah is now going to tell us a little bit about some tips and tricks. All right, awesome. So some tips and tricks. So besides just text, you can also add images to your Power Notes project. And it's very easy to do this. You just have to right click on the image and you will have an option listed there to save two Power Notes. So you can see in a little screenshot, you've got the little yellow P down there and you can just go ahead and click that. Something that I mess up a lot when I'm doing that is for whatever reason when I'm using an image, like you see we've got some of our images from our digital collections here, if I right click on it and then I hit save to Power Notes, you also have to choose a topic on Power Notes so that same little black box will pop up. And you just want to remember to actually select a project and a topic after you've hit save image or it won't save to Power Notes even though you hit save to Power Notes. And if you're like me, you might go back and get very confused when your image is not there. So just make sure that you are always saving it to a specific place in Power Notes. So what else have we got here? If you wanted to save just a single word for whatever reason, maybe you want to look it up later or it's a place you don't know or for whatever reason, you can highlight a single word. The only thing is that you have to hold down control on a PC or command on a Mac and then it will give you that little black box that will give you the option of where to save it. So highlighting single words is possible. Just have to hold down those buttons to make it work. And then our last couple of tips and tricks are just about PDFs. So Power Notes does work best with the HTML text. You could see that with the document with the article that Carissa looked at, she used the text that was right there. So if the database that you're using allows you to just read the full text right there, that will be the easiest for Power Notes. But Power Notes does work in PDFs as well. You just have to make sure that it's open in the browser. And you just have to kind of be mindful that sometimes it will work and sometimes it will not. And that is just depending on how the PDF itself has been scanned or created and how well you can highlight in it. So since it is based on highlighting, if you have one of those PDFs that's more of a picture and you don't have the ability to highlight, then Power Notes might not work as well. And you might be better off just trying to save it as an image. So got to be just a little careful with PDFs. Most PDFs, it will work just fine for as long as you've got them open in the browser. And it is something that you can highlight. So lastly, we just want to close out with two different resources for you to check. The first one is a guide that I've created to help you walk through this tool. I will link it out in a separate document for you to view. It's a really great place to go again if you're wanting to walk through the steps of setting up an account, getting started, downloading. The other thing I would recommend is that Power Notes has their own blog. And it walks through a lot of problems you might run into or even more tips and tricks that we were not able to go over today. And last but not least, you're always welcome to email me, Carissa, Utk.edu. I'm happy to answer any Power Notes questions that might come up for you. So thank you for coming to this workshop. Thank you for watching the recording. If you would like to fill out our survey, we'd love to hear from you. And this is a reminder that next week's workshop will be on September 16th about topic selection and introduction to searching. So thank you so much. And we will take any questions at this point.