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Building a Searchable Literature Archive With Keywords?
Sooner Boomer writes "I'm trying to help drag a professor I work with into the 20th century. Although he is involved in cutting-edge research (nanotechnology), his method of literature search is to begin with digging through the hundreds of 3-ring binders that contain articles (usually from PDFs) that he has printed out. Even though the binders are labeled, the articles can only go under one 'heading' and there's no way to do a keyword search on subject, methods, materials, etc. Yeah, google is pretty good for finding stuff, as are other on-line literature services, but they only work for articles that are already on-line. His literature also includes articles copied from books, professional correspondence, and other sources. Is there a FOSS database or archive method (preferably with a web interface) where he could archive the PDFs and scanned documents and be able to search by keywords? It would also be nice to categorize them under multiple subject headings if possible. I know this has been covered ad nauseum with things like photos and the like, but I'm not looking at storage as such: instead I'm trying to find what's stored."
Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange.
Unless I'm in a parallel dimension of some sorts, the twentieth century did in fact include PDF's.
I understand though, teh intarwebs r hard 2 uze!
If only GOOGLE had a way to search your DESKTOP, that would be perfect.
I'm replying at the (current) top response so hopefully someone will read it. First, thanks to all, including the AC's that replied. I have mod points to burn today, but unfortunatly I'm posting replies so I can't use them in this topic. Next - personal details: I was born in Texas, on the 4th of July, and yes, I have an uncle named Sam. If any of you call me "Yankee" Doodle, please enclose your address so I can reply in person. I do work at the University of Oklahoma as an independant consulting engineer. The nickname came from a maillist (now long gone...sigh) on Thompson/Center Contenders. These are a very fine made single-shot firearm that can be configured either as a pistol or a rifle (or shotgun) with a wide choice of barrels. I enjoy shooting very large custom-made calibers (wildcats) usually in the pistol configuration. One of my favorites is a 445SuperMag with a 10" barrel The 445SM is a .44Mag stretched 3/8". The Hornady reloading book (4th ed) says "There is considerable muzzle blast and recoil with this gun. It is not a pistol for the inexperienced shooter. Those who are willing to practice and become callosed to its noise and recoil will be rewarded with an accurate, extremely powerful handgun" (they are speaking about a Dan Wesson revolver, not a Contender, but the warning still applies). My 14" .35Rem barel is a pussycat in comparison.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.