Advice for storing paper notes digitally

Hello! I am a year 2 undergrad psych student and I was wondering if anyone has any advice on how to organise paper notes as an online pdf:
I tend to do paper notes (or type stuff out and print them, because I like to add additional notes by hand later on when I revise) and file them away using dividers, one folder for one module and dividers for each topic, where each divider would include both lecture and seminar notes from that week.
Last year I did everything by hand and exams were all held online at home, so everything was fine, but this year they will be held on site, using school computers, and we were told there is a possibility we might not be allowed paper notes for the exam - open-book access will be limited to onedrive.
I understand that just because it's open-book doesn't mean I should rely on searching up info in my notes, but does anyone have any advice on how I should store my paper notes as pdf(s) online in an orderly fashion, solely for the purpose of use during the exam? Should I scan everything from one module into one pdf or have separate pdfs for each topic?
For physical notes, it's easy for me to track down info because I usually remember which papers/studies are from which topic so I flip until I find it, but this is oddly inconvenient to do for pdfs, because I have to scroll down instead of being able to flip back and forth whilst skipping pages I know are irrelevant.
This will be easier if I use separate pdfs for each topic, but that means I have to have multiple pdfs open at the same time (which I'm not even sure is possible using onedrive on a school computer - I normally do work on my personal laptop).
On the other hand, if I scan all of my notes into one pdf, I feel like I'll be wasting a lot of time trying to scroll to the topic I need, given that there doesn't seem to be anything like a bookmarking function available.
Has anyone encountered this problem before and is there any advice on this? I'm not afraid of "failing" or "doing bad" in terms of not knowing things, but I really don't want to be in a situation where I do remember the information and just needed some confirmation, but am unable to find it solely because my notes are a mess. (p.s I will be posting this question on multiple forums so if anyone happens to see this again, I'm awfully sorry)

Reply 1

Lancaster Student Ambassador

Official Rep

Original post by gagesPFC

Hey!
I would recommend looking into bookmarks: https://www.sejda.com/pdf-bookmarks (as an example, but there is a lot of software that offer this functionality). This essentially allows you to set a table of contents, which is recognised by many PDF editors and viewers (do check it works on onedrive for you).
Furthermore, you can make your own table of contents: type up a page that says a topic and the page number at the start. That way, you would only need to type in the number of the page for the relevant topic to switch to it. The issue is that if you add a page in the middle, you would have to edit the table of contents manually.
Another solution might be completely digitising your notes using an OCR tool to convert your handwriting to text - but that depends on your handwriting and checking the accuracy of generated results is very time consuming.

I hope some of these suggestions help.

Polina,
Lancaster University Student Ambassador.