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THE ALL NEW
WEB DATA HARVESTER/ORGANIZER
       RADIUS
WITH BROWSER EXTENSION!



IN A HURRY?
Radius in 30 Seconds
Radius in 10 Minutes (a Video)
What Makes Radius Unique

A One-Page Quick Start Guide
(and a full reference help manual)


1. Web Research in a Class of its Own
The new Radius inaugurates a category-bending tool in the Nota Bene suite that takes your research to the Web and then harvests it as both bibliographic and non-bibliographic data. Radius extends earlier citation-capture capabilities, and now captures, saves, and structures virtually everything available in the digital world. Text data, citation data, URL information and more are captured for your use with the rest of the Nota Bene suite.

Radius gives you access to everything — ranging from your professional/scholarly/ pedagogical needs to your personal interests — by watching and effortlessly harvesting, according to rules over which you have full control:
  • Everything that matters to you as you browse the web
  • Everything you copy to the clipboard in other programs
  • Everything that gets saved in folders you specify
Radius saves, preserves, and converts the data, making it available to all other Nota Bene applications as both structured and unstructured data:
  • As field-oriented Radius/Ibidem data
  • As free-form text that can be searched (instantly) by Orbis
Radius offers capabilities found in general-market stand-alone programs such as One Note and Evernote and endows them with academic research powers. Capture standard web pages, product descriptions, articles from on-line magazines or journals, recipes, news reports, programming tips, editorials, sermons, lists of recommended movies, Travelzoo deals, Ebay pages . . . anything.
IN A NUTSHELL
Radius automatically monitors the clipboard and selected folders
to capture and convert data of all kinds
— academic or personal, serious or whimsical —
saving it in structured, and unstructured, forms, right on your computer
to make sure that you don't miss anything that matters


I. Web Pages at Your Fingertips — ALL NEW!
Radius is not just another “web clipper,” but something much more — it captures everything for you, and creates both structured and unstructured formats in discriminating ways. It begins by making sure that you have a local version of the page on your computer, and then continues its processing. With a nod to a farming father and grandfather, perhaps the best term is “web harvester,” with all that that implies — it’s bringing in the bounty from the fields.

Select what you want to capture in one of two ways:
  • Click the Browser Extension button (see below)
  • Select the text (Ctrl+A to select the entire page), and then Ctrl+C to copy it to the clipboard
Radius will then:

Create a database record of that page in a special Radius Web Pages database
Automatically download a copy of the web page to your computer, as HTML text, so you can have its contents available even if it disappears on-line
Give the records in this web database the same structure as your other bibliographic databases, so that records that are of research interest can be copied to your working Ibidem database and cited in your Nota Bene document
Make this downloaded text — of any kind, academic or personal — automatically and instantly available for searching by Orbis+, using the myriad options the latter application has to find text, analyze and discover relationships, and then incorporate passages of interest in your Nota Bene documents, including note-taking files.
Ensure that everything — as always — works together as part of Nota Bene's vaunted paradigm of application integration

ORDER AMIDST THE DIVERSITY
You can maximize focused retrieval of the myriad kinds of pages Radius can capture — academic articles, general news, travel advice, recipes, product pages, virtually anything — by designating the type or category of the captured page in the Keyword/Category field in popup Radius (as described below)

By adding a category, you can search the Web Pages database for only those records in a particular category
  • To search by category, open the Web Pages database in Ibidem, select the Text Search option, and specify the category you want to search from the drop list in the Keywords/Category field
    • You can combine a category search with other searches — Ibidem lets you search up to 32 fields in a single search
  • Note that the automatic Orbis textbase described below searches all captured records, not specific categories, but the matching entries not of interest can simply be ignored

WITH INSTANT AUTOMATIC SEARCHABILITY
When you capture a web page, it is instantly accessible to the Radius Web Pages textbase created automatically by popup Orbis — the newly captured page is added to everything you've captured previously, whether a dozen pages, or tens of thousands, instantly searchable, letting you see how what you've just now retrieved relates to text from countless other sources.
II. Citation Capture — Enhanced
Radius includes the Archiva option that captures citations directly from pages such as JStor, Project Muse, EBSCO, and other aggregators. But it now extends these citation-gathering options to any web page that offers export of citations in RIS format and/or downloading of PDF files.

III. Zotero Record Capture — ALL NEW!
While Nota Bene 14 lets you import Zotero records that you have saved in RIS format, Radius's clipboard monitoring makes this much easier and more direct: simply use Ctrl+Shift+C in Zotero to directly import all selected records (without having to save them to a RIS file first) — all records will be added, automatically and instantly, to Radius/Ibidem.

IV. Book Catalog Capture — ALL NEW!
Radius now lets you capture records from the new Edelweiss Plus site that publishes seasonal catalogs from major university presses and other publishers, making it very easy to keep abreast of new scholarly publications in your field of interest.

V. ISBN Capture — Enhanced
While Archiva+ lets you create records from ISBN #'s in files (using File, Import Records, and designating the file), Radius expands ISBN capture to other domains by automatically monitoring:
  • The clipboard for text containing ISBN numbers
    • For example, if you copy an entire university press catalog you find on-line, or an article that has links to bibliographic records, Radius will extract all ISBN numbers from whatever text is on the clipboard and generate separate bibliographic records for each item found
      • In many cases, even if ISBN numbers are not shown directly on the web page, they are often embedded in the text, letting Radius build records — it almost seems like magic — from them
  • Files containing embedded ISBN numbers that get downloaded or copied (by other applications, or web pages) into any of the folders you tell Radius to watch
    • This greatly simplifies the Archiva+ ability to capture records from smart phone ISBN bar code scanners, since all you need to do is to configure your scanner to automatically upload the captured data to one of the specified folders, and Radius will automatically build records from the data
      • Whether you can set your scanner to automatically upload the records to a specific folder depends solely on the app in use; we cannot provide any technical support or advice about which app does this most easily, or specifics on how they might work
    • NOTE: Automatic monitoring of folders for files with ISBN numbers requires Archiva+ (as does direct import via File, Import Records of files with ISBN numbers)
VI. Captures Beyond the Web — ALL NEW!
Radius also gives you the option of creating structured Radius/Ibidem records from any text put on the clipboard by programs other than Nota Bene, or written to files in the folders Radius is watching, creating the appropriate kind of records out of that data:


How This All Works
Radius is constantly monitoring data that gets copied to the clipboard, and in files that are created or modified in all the folders being watched. When it finds data, it generates records, and writes the records to the appropriate databases, in the designated categories, according to the following sequence:
  1. Citation: recognized citation page (JStor, Project Muse, EBSCO, etc.) — {Captured Citations}
  2. Catalog: book catalog page (currently records you select by browsing Edelweiss Plus) — {Catalogs}
  3. RIS: RIS formatted data — your active Ibidem database
  4. Text — Web Pages
    • Web page (entire page, or fragment)
      • Radius captures structured data including source URL, title, date accessed, etc.
      • A copy of the web page is automatically downloaded, and a local link is created (user can suppress downloading)
    • Other text
      • There is no URL to save, and no text to download, but a record noting the source of the text and the date accessed will be created
  5. ISBN: ISBN Numbers — {ISBN #'s}
    • If the ISBN numbers are detected on a web-page record (item #4 above), Radius can be configured to either:
      • Automatically generate records for each ISBN reference found in the web page (automatically, in the background, when creating the base web-page record)
      • As a separate, subsequent, step (click the book icon on the popup dialog described below)
    • If these ISBN numbers are found in a regular file (that is, not in a page that would normally produce a web-page record), the generation of records will be automatic (for users of Archiva+)


A BRIEF NOTICE ABOUT PRIVACY

Radius captures the data you tell it to capture, and saves that data only to the file(s) and database(s) you specify, whether on your local computer, or in the cloud, and never leaves the selected location(s) — it is your work, and not accessible to anybody else.



2. Watch — & Edit — in Real Time
Radius captures everything. And you can watch it working in real time with the Radius system tray popup (shown in the bottom right in the image below).


This popup lets you:
  • Specify the type/category of the captured page (in the Keyword/Category field at the top)
    Radius can capture almost anything — academic articles, general news, travel advice, recipes, product pages, etc.); adding a category lets you later limit your database searches to specific types of data, as described above
  • Make edits in the captured record, either changing/expanding on the text in a captured field, or adding notes or comments to other fields to match your research needs or personal interests
  • View the last specified number of captured records, regardless of the kind of captured record (see below)
  • Open the links captured in the record (the original web URL, or the local link)
  • See what has been captured without having Ibidem loaded (or before or after NB is loaded, depending on how you have configured it)
As always, there are ample configuration options. Among many other options, you can control:
  • Whether this app pops up automatically when you capture a page
  • Where it pops up on the screen
  • The size of the pop up
  • Whether it automatically disappears after a specified period of time (unless you click into it to activate it)
  • The degree of poupup transparency, or whether it is opaque
  • Which web pages (e.g., www.ebay.com) and applications are excluded (clipboard text from them will not be captured)


3. Browser Extension

Radius includes a browser extension that offers signicant additional capture options, including making it possible to:
  • Capture all of the elements on a page, without having to first make sure that you selected the proper frame/element on that page
    • Web pages increasingly are composed of separate elements, where clicking Ctrl+A to select everything actually only selects a component of that page, so that copying it with Ctrl+C misses important data contained on that page
  • Download the content of PDFs when the url is to a pdf file, rather than to a standard HTML web page
  • Capture everything more simply:
    • You no longer need to highlight anything on a page before capturing it
    • The process is thus a single step, without requiring Ctrl+A followed by Ctrl+C
  • Work in an environment where the capture possibilities are made available in ways that match common user expectations
    • The presence of the extension on the browser also reminds users of the options provided by Radius
Activating the extension on Chrome or Edge:
  • The Radius browser extension for both Chrome and Edge is available by going to the Chrome Web Store at https://chromewebstore.google.com/ from your active browswer (either Edge or Chrome):
    • Search for "Nota Bene Radius" under Extensions
    • Be sure to pin the extension to your browser toolbar on the extension management page (to prevent it from disappearing)
    See also the helpful video created by Mark Szuchman at www.notabene.com/nbvideo/RadiusWebBowserExtension.mp4
  • Once the extension has been installed on your brower, you can assign it a shortcut key if desired
    • Right click on the extension icon, and choose Manage Extensions
    • You can choose whatever shortcut key is offered by your browser, but Ctrl+R seems like a nice choice for Radius
    • You may need to turn off the Radius extension, and turn it back on again (or Reload it) to activate this shortcut

  • Note that the extension currently works only on Chrome and Edge, which together cover the vast majority of browsers
    • While statistics vary depending on where you look, this should cover anywhere from 75% to 90% of all users (see, for example, https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp)
    • We are exploring whether we can create versions for Safari and perhaps Firefox, but can make no promises
Notes on the browser extension (additional notes will be added as we hear back from users about special circumstances or sites):
  • The first time you copy from a page, you may be asked by the browser (not the Radius extension) if you want to allow copying from that (home) URL
  • If you have a selection on the web page, the browser extension will capture data just from that selected text (including any hidden codes/data associated with that selected text)
  • At least on Chrome and Edge, how you select sometimes matters, including when selecting ISBN numbers
    • If you select the number by clicking and dragging with the mouse, you may receive a message telling you that you cannot capture that data
      • Currently that message tells you to click back into the web page, and try again, but this may just result in the same message if you continue to select the number in the same way
      • The next build will include a more appropriate message: "Unable to copy to clipboard. Click into the document and try again. Or try to copy normally with Ctrl+C."
  • If a web page has a button such as "Click to Read More," or something similar, you will need to click it in order for the full text to be captured (that text is not actually available on the page until you click)
  • Many aggregator sites have multiple articles as part of that site:
    • Using the extension on that site (without highlighting the desired article) will capture all the articles/stories on that page
    • Because MSN seems to be the default web page/aggregator for Edge, we have written special rules for it:
      • Radius will automatically "click" the "Read More" button for all articles on that page
      • Radius will only capture the text and data/information for the article in the current scroll view