How do you organize information? [closed]

Question

I have a relatively large collection of useful books (paper and electronic), [academic] papers (mostly electronic) and web bookmarks. However, I don't have an overview of the material. Currently I have most of the electronic (PDF/DJVU) material in a single hierarchical folder and use filename search.

Two questions.

1. Do you have a similar problem, and how do you deal with it?

2. Can you recommend some software to help with organizing bibliographic information, including web links. Easy editing of hierarchy and tags is a must. I would also like to be able to write own comments for each entry. [With my current scheme, just using the filesystem, does not provide other metadata.] A plugin for emacs would be perfect, but it's not a must. (org-mode MIGHT be adequate).

Answer 1

I assume you're in an academic environment. For keeping track of stuff that other people have written, I use the Zotero plugin for Firefox. All of the following use cases apply:

• stores electronic resources of all sorts - links, papers, searches etc from either local or Internet searches
• keep track of publication information (it can scrape ACM, IEEE, Google Scholar links) e.g. authors, conference name, publication, volume, issue etc
• anything it stores you can organise into folders, tag and comment on
• full text search (HTML, PDF, txt)
• annotations on a web page (I haven't used this myself)
• Bibliographic references - not perfect for the papers I'm writing, as it doesn't do ACM referencing amazingly, but there's a number of other formats

I haven't used it for my own writing, but actually it would work for that as well.

Everything is stored locally, which could be a good or a bad thing. It means that I can work without Internet access, but migrating between machines is not seamless. I have done it once, with very little pain, but it's not the same as logging on to Gmail from anywhere in the world.

Answer 2

I once tried to solve this problem in an overcomplicated way by dumping the output of find . into an emacs buffer, running a couple of macros to convert the file heirarchy into an org-mode style hierarchy, and then tagging with a combination of org-mode tags and emacs bookmarks.

This method worked well enough, but ended up being awkward whenever I added new material. In the end, I just keep bibliographical info in an separate .org file for each paper/blog entry that I write, and then use a disk indexer to find relevant documents.

IMHO, indexed search beats hierarchy anyday.

Answer 3

For web links and bookmarks i use evernote it help me a lot you could download a desktop app for windows/mac and use everywhere from web also it have a browser extension http://www.evernote.com/about/learn_more/

As for the PDF materials-books you could use calibre, a nice app that let you to easily organize your e-books in a library folder, edit meta data and more.

Answer 4

I've always found that the Gigantic, Precarious Pile of Crap filing system best fit my personality. If you're sifting through your reference material and find last week's sandwich...that's the way to do it.

Answer 5

I am facing the same problem and thinking to organize information and put it on my blog. For web links I use bookmark and using xmarks plugin to sync them to have a backup.

In your blog you can create hierarchical categories and organize your information there for future use. You can have recommended reading list, wish list for books and other links. It will benefit you as well as others.

There is a plugin called readability for awesome reading experience on web, it provides a functionality of Read Later. I never tried because it is paid, but you can just check whether you can manage your reading list in more organized way.