Sometimes waiting a while is the best option. I didn't wait, I started to write my own pdf-manager but never really finished it. The goal was to keep track of all my research sources (read online papers in pdf form) with copies available offline whenever possible. Additionally, I wanted to keep notes on these resources as I read this. All bundled together, instead of notes and actual pdf's flying all over the place.
How I designed my to-be manager and what fate it met is a story for another day. Fast forward 3-4 months and find me falling back to Zotero. Why? Because now it's version 2.0. They have an excellent demo video on zotero.org, so I won't detail it here. The thing to note, though, is that I came back to it because they added a server-sync functionality in 2.0. All I needed, now, was a WebDAV server storage, which Jungledisk provides off the Amazon S3 storage for $2/month + 15c/GB-month - peanuts. WebDAV is just a protocol on top of http for generic storage access. Again, jungledisk.com is very intuitive and works right out-of-the-box. (No, I don't use Windows or Mac).
Conclusion: Firefox + Zotero plugin + Jungledisk a/c make it a breeze to keep track of your resources from anywhere, anytime. It's worth your time exploring these.
Caveat: It may not be possible to include your existing resources into the Zotero library. If you think of your research resources/projects as music albums, just switch to Zotero from your next album.
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5 comments:
Have you tried Okular and basket? What advantage does Zotero give over okular and basket?
Haven't tried it yet, but it looks good too. However, you lose the source information the moment you leave the browser environment, which also restricts how much meta-information you are able to scrape out for the document, if you do any. Does basKet segregate title and abstract etc? And the conference, whenever possible?
Ubiquitous access is also a strong feature of Zotero with the server sync and platform-independent design, which was a major reason I went back to it.
I do not know why you want to keep source information. In general if you have a pdf of a paper, you just want to keep that. Why worry about its sourse?
And about conference/abstract information, Okular or Basket doesn't take care of that. So, thats a strong point in favor of Zotero. About ubiquitous access, you are anyways using webdav, so just mount it on your harddisk.
Manu - That's a really clever system you've got worked out. However, if you'd like all that functionality in one package, you might like to try Mendeley. Mendeley extracts citation data from PDFs, organizes your library for you, and can also back up everything to the web for you.
This is probably the best way to preserve the metadata, but if you have any other clever hacks, let me know!
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