Hello folks:
Yes, I'm still here. Since I'm not such an early adopter
as I was in my
youth, I'm not using the 8.0 beta, so
there's less to say these days. (For
the record, I
hit 50, a few months before Mervyn hit 70.)
I have a "non-NB" question. If we were cultists, it might
appear to be a
"betrayal of NB" question, but I really
don't think it is.
I'm teaching an upper-level course right now that has a strong
research
component. I'm trying to take about 10
minutes each week to introduce some
basic building-block
research skills, techniques and strategies. In a few
days I want to do one such session on electronic searching. I find
that few
students are using even the most basic tools --
like taking notes in a word
processor, which for
undergraduate projects can all be in one file, and then
doing a very basic Ctrl-F searches.
What I would like to is give them four or five alternatives --
from the most
basic sort of search I just described, to
the Rolls Royce of textbase
management, our own Nota
Bene. Realistically, only a few graduate school
bound students are going to consider purchasing Nota Bene. But if a
few
more know that Nota Bene is out there, and start
with intermediate software
tools, eventually a few of
them might upgrade to Nota Bene. This is why I
don't think I'm betraying NB by posing my question, which is...
Do any of you know of freeware, shareware, or less-than-$50
software
programs out there that do some of what Orbis
does, indexing and searching
multiple files, probably in
MS Word formats? 7-8 years ago I found a couple
of
these when I was teaching another research seminar, but I am sure my
findings are now woefully out of date. And if I can avoid
re-doing not only
my own earlier investigation, but an
investigation one of you might have
done, all the
better.
(BTW, to anticipate the answer some of you might have, the
next-step-up
suggestion beyond simple Ctrl-F searching
that I am going to offer will be
MSN and Google desktop
searching. So you don't have to remind me of that.
What I would like third-level options to offer is more targeted searching
--
e.g. in specific folders, or with certain kinds of
filenames.)
Gerald W. Schlabach
Theology
Department
University of St. Thomas
2115 Summit Avenue / JRC 153
St. Paul MN
55103
651/962-5332
gwschlabach@stthomas.edu