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Document Management For Research With Annotation?
msimm writes "I'm currently looking for a document management system for personal and research-related use. Having looked at Alfresco and KnowledgeTree along with a slew of similar open source document management systems they seem to have a common set of features including version control, archiving, document permission/ownership and search/indexing. What I'd like, in order to help me manage my own continually growing collection of pdf/doc/odf/rtf/txt files, would be something that allowed me to view and annotate documents (and possibly collaborate/share notes) without requiring me to download, edit and re-upload each document. Obviously there are plenty of capable document management systems out there, so I really suspect I've simply missed something and am hoping someone can point me to a better way to index, search, collaborate and keep and share notes on the ever increasing glut of useful information I seem to use and collect."
Nothing much more to say here... I have found EndNote very useful.
if you want a low-tech approach, just install a wiki. Mediawiki is full featured while MoinMoin is easy to install and configure (no separate database needed). I haven't used any others.
Collaborate, in my opinion, implies that there is some advanced messaging going on in the background. And the persistence of that messaging (whether on a centralized server or via some P2P/Client routing protocol) is not only complex but often needs to be specific to what you want to collaborate about. Let's look at annotations. Where are they stored? How am I notified if you add an annotation to my document? How do I track my annotations? How do I share my annotations? Where is that stored? Etc. The questions raised are endless.
A coworker implemented a basic ruby service of this where I work and I have to say that he didn't find any open source alternatives before he started that fulfilled anywhere near what we needed. Ruby made it pretty easy (1 or 2 person job) with the emphasis just being javascript and DOM coding to get the interface correct. Then we just had a RESTful service for storing these and from there we'll keep adding on features like messaging/e-mail alearts/etc for the users when we get time. Yes, I'm aware that if I open sourced this you could help me out with that but I'm sorry, my employer is not on that boat (yet).
For your reference, even just document management is a sticky solution to find in open source, we've talked about it time and time again.
My work here is dung.
Would Google's Wave work for you? It's real time, centralized, and browser based. I say privacy concerns aside, because the protocol is available, and people could build their own servers (such as http://code.google.com/p/pygowave-server/)...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
I use Papers. It does not do everything you want, but it is a nice management tool. It is still growing in features, and the support staff is very responsive. (They provided me, same day, a new NIB file that allowed me to use it on my small hackintoshed Dell Mini 9 screen.)
The link is here: http://mekentosj.com/papers/
Otherwise, Endnote works well. I know many who use it. There are a few others that are also out there.
Good luck with it.
Zotero may well be what you're looking for. Much better and more open source than EndNote (mentioned above).
Zotero might be worth a look. It's a Firefox plugin (open-source), mainly designed for keeping track of a collection of academic litterature. It allows you to organize the papers in folders, tag, annotate, and share the papers and annotations with others, all easily available in the FF gui. You can export lists of references to Word/OpenOffice/TeX when writing papers, they can be autoformatted to a wide range of citation styles.
It works really well (with full-text search) for storing web pages/pdfs. I don't know how well it works for .odt etc. Even if your purpose is not that of the typical university researcher it might be useful. For instance, recently I've liked using it for storing job ads, and my corresponding applications.
If you already have it installed, iTunes may be a simple solution.
http://lifehacker.com/software/pdf/geek-to-live--organize-your-pdf-library-with-itunes-240447.php
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Wikindx3 is a full-fledged bibliographic database that can manage *any* type of document, and permits annotations. As an added bonus, you can export the biblio info in any number of formats (including my favorite, .bib for LaTeX).
I've had good success with OpenDocMan as well, but I'm not sure if that application permits annotation (at least I've never used that feature set).
I use WSS as it's free, but sadly not open source. My documents are not locked in though so I'm not tooo concerned. It's worth a look/assessment at the least.
Microsoft Office SharePoint includes the capabilities you mentioned (version control, archiving, document permission/ownership and search/indexing) and is on par price-wise with KnowledgeTree (though not free). They also have a hosted model, SharePoint Online.
The capabilities you list actually needing--index, search, collaborate and keep and share notes--might be better fit by Microsoft OneNote. It doesn't do version control and document permission/ownership, but it does what you described doing. At my place of business, there are two categories of people: those who love OneNote and those who haven't tried it.
For a basic, low-tech solution I'd suggest TagTeam (http://www.andrew-quinney.com/tagteam.html). It's a basic file tagging utility that makes use of filesystem metadata (PC and Mac), so any changes you make to a given file are immediately visible to others with access to the same file. It also includes a powerful searching language.
http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/
I use a git repository containing a bibtex file that tells me where the documents are with an annote field containing information. documents are put in the git repository. If I need to annotate them on the paper for not forgeting something about it, I use xournal. And I push everything in the git repository.
It implies that people update the repository which is in my opinion not really a problem.
You're looking for a reference management system, not a document management system. (although, they might not deal with all of the stuff that you mentioned that a document management system will)
Zotero should work for a single person, but if you're trying to do this for an office, you might want to take a look at Aigaion.
If you want to look at others to see what best fits your needs, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software
And , if you still can't find anything -- try asking on the Code4Lib mailing list, as you might need one of the 'integrated' library solutions.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I use OneNote. Generally, I really like the concept behind the program. However, it has one fatal flaw for a academic environment: its poor ability to handle pdf's. Given that OneNote is a Microsoft program, I have little hope this flaw will ever be fixed.
Currently, I insert pdf's into OneNote as print outs. This makes OneNote deal with each page as a separate image. While the images can be viewed, it is impossible to attach notes or highlights to an image. Markups can be placed over the image of the page, but nothing stops subsequent edits from moving the page image while the markups remain stationary.
So, I am quite interested in finding a better solution and have been reading these replies with interest. It is strange that this category of software, which seems so natural for a computer, has lagged so far behind.
So far it's one of the best I've tried and it does a pretty great job of extracting all the reference/author data. As a desktop application, for my purposes at least, it seems just about perfect with my only current quibbles (only an hour or so into use) would be 1) the way it's search handles multiple matches within a document (hint: it doesn't) 2) they way it displays matched documents (matches aren't highlighted and must be manually paged/scrolled to).
Those 2 points are kind of important issues for an indexing/search/research tool, but overall I'm still really impressed with the project and features like the folder watch (rather then manually importing new documents) definitely add value.
Of course it's pretty slick too, which is always nice.
Quack, quack.
From what I've heard http://www.agorum.com/ is what you're looking for.