Omea pdf organiser
I’ve been looking for a pdf organiser or something similar to deal with 4.5 gig of downloaded articles in my ‘other people’s work’ folder. All the good ones seem to be for Mac only. I can’t use google desktop (or at least, had bad experiences with it the last time I tried) - I had to keep turning it off to use speech rec or praat.
I’ve been using omea for a week or so now and it’s pretty good. I’m just using it for file organisation and annotation, not email, tasks, or rss/bookmarks, and not even all my files at this point (although that may change). It’s just indexing my ‘other people’s work’ file. It’s stable, and it doesn’t interfere with other programs (yet, touch wood). There’s a bug in the current version that doesn’t let word docs appear in the previewer (it’ll be fixed in the next update, I’m told) but word docs are still indexed. It also gives you a history (like window’s ‘history’ function, but seems faster), which is useful.
January 21, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Try Zotero. It works as a Firefox plugin, hence on all major OSes. It beautifully integrates with the browsing experience, making it extremely simply to grab references from major repositories like Google Scholar, JSTOR, CSA/LLBA, and lots more. If you save a ref, it automagically gives you a record with all relevant fields (author, year, journal, pages, etc.); and for fulltext resources it also grabs the PDF.
If many of your PDFs actually are digital versions of published or at least citable works, Zotero (which bills itself as a next generation reference manager) is going to be a great help. I made the move two months ago and it has given me complete control over three Gig worth of saved PDFs and other materials. Records can be organized in collections (recursively) and you can also use tags. There is a nice ‘locate’ button which, given the right URL resolver, gives direct access to online repositories in case you didn’t save a local copy. And that’s just the surface.
No, I have no stakes in the Zotero enterprise. I just completely fell for it. See zotero.org; there are nice tutorials and intro movies there, along with very helpful forums.