In a comment on a recent blog post, reader Maria Tello mentioned that she would like to hear an update from me on how I use my Livescribe pen for genealogy.
The Livescribe pen is a smart pen with a voice recorder in it that links the recording with the notes you are taking. So you can touch an area of your notes (taken in its special notebook) and hear what was being said when you took the note.
I bought my Livescribe Echo in 2013 and enthusiastically used it to take notes at conferences. In my blog post about it, I mentioned the ways I could see using it for genealogy.
True confession: The Livescribe pen is gathering dust in my desk drawer. It’s lost its luster for me. I realized that I never took the time to go back and listen to the recorded notes, which made the notes I did take less valuable (since I took fewer notes, assuming I’d listen to them).
I really do think it could be a very valuable for doing oral history interviews. I just haven’t used it that way.
It’s worth noting that since I bought my Livescribe Echo, the company has the Livescribe 3, which links with an iPhone/iPad app (as well as Android devices). It uses your device’s voice recorder, which makes the pen smaller. And the notes you take in your notebook are transmitted to the device. They can even be transcribed easily. I won’t be rushing out to buy it, since it turns out its utility for me wasn’t quite what I anticipated, but for those taking a lot of notes, I think it’s worth checking out.
My wife and I bought a Livescribe a number of years back when my wife had gone back to college. It worked fantastically for her college needs. Especially when reviewing notes. She would even have small get-togethers with some classmates to study and she would play the recordings for which ever part there was a question about. Settled many arguments.
When we started researching genealogy, we decided to use the Livescribe when doing interviews. The best and truly only way to use the pen is to write out notes as you normally would and “tagging” areas for changes in subjects during the interview.
I have always been a horrible note taker and the pen only made it worse for me. But for my wife, it was great. However, the recordings can be difficult to manage on a computer since there seems to be little to no rhyme or reason for how the pen labels recordings.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Jim. It’s interesting to read that the pen worked well for your wife, but not for you. I had good luck with it with conferences, in terms of taking outline notes and filling them in with audio, but only when I would actually take the time to listen to the audio.