Ask Slashdot: Software To Organise a Heterogeneous Mix of Files?

BertieBaggio writes "I am a medical student at the end of an academic year trying to get my notes organised. I'm looking for a software document organisation system to organise a mix of text notes, journal articles, diagrams and scans. Ideally such a system would permit full-text and metadata search, multiple categorisations (eg tags), preserve the underlying files and be cross-platform (Linux/Windows/OS X). While I'm not averse to paying for such a complex solution, ideally the software would be FOSS so that extension or migration are possible if necessary. Desktop search (eg Google Desktop) probably does 90% of what I want apart from multiple categorisations, which is the feature I'm most interested in. Searching turned up a similar question over at 43folders which pointed me in the direction of Papers and DevonThink, but these are OS X only and seem to be aimed more at academic paper organisation. What recommendations does the Slashdot community have for categorising and organising a heterogeneous mix of files?"

Comments

Quick Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Zotero - is awesome - Firefox plugin

an age old solution

[Akatosh]

Sounds like you're describing a directory tree. Search with grep, or any similar utility. Put files in multiple categories (appropriately named directories) using ln. It's cross platform, timeless, and seems to do what you describe. I feel like I'm missing something though.

Re:an age old solution

[oh_my_080980980]

Because that's not a proper document management solution. Directories/Folders are not a substitute for documents tagged with meta data. Not too mention you can't create views.

Emacs Org-Mode

[he-sk]

Emacs Org-Mode. I've learned a little Emacs syntax just to use that package after I've being a Vim user for over 15 years.

Re:Gunna hate this BUT

[Anonymous Coward]

As a SharePoint admin for three years, I can definitely say, without any kind of reservation, that it is utter crap.

Now don't get me wrong, the idea of SharePoint is great. But it is badly designed (the users can't find any document they need) and badly implemented (loosing data is unacceptable).

If you need a document management system, I advice anyone to use SharePoint for a few months and then switch to another system. You'll appreciate your new system so much more that way...

OP here

[BertieBaggio]

Many thanks for all the informative replies so far. I've had a quick glance at Evernote, thebrain, Nepomuk (I'm loving KDE4 so far after switching a week or so ago), OpenKM and FreeMind and these seem promising. I've still to look at emacs' org-mode, and when I do I will try to put my vi prejudices aside ;-) Some of the other suggestions are rather good but aren't really what I'm looking for as they are either fully cloud-based (eg Google Docs, Wave) or one platform only (eg Sharepoint) or too expensive (hire a secretary :-P).

I like the idea of some of the "roll your own" ideas, eg directories + hard links, serving from a web server or wiki. The problem is as I progress though the medical degree, I am likely to have decreasing amounts of time to tinker with things if they have shortcomings; and to be honest they probably will as I am unlikely to have thought through the problem fully! Plus third-party solutions will definitely have substantially more polish than anything hastily dreamt up by me!

A shared wiki for my cohort / medical school / country may be an option on top of whatever comes out of this discussion, but I'd like something personal as... ah, let's say medical students have wildly varying standards of what is acceptable for notes ;-)

My supplementary questions for anyone still wanting to chip in:

• Do Evernote and thebrain/personalbrain have an "offline" mode? That is, can I keep things nicely organised locally instead of having to upload to the cloud? Evernote seems to suggest this is the case but at a very cursory perusal both seem to stop short of actually saying "you can use this to organise the files on your hard drive".
• Do any other docs / medical students want to chip in and say what they use? I suspect each solution will have practical considerations that may affect my decision or not. Sharing practical experience is very useful, even if it's just "I use Evernote and find it useful" as some have said above.
• Similarly, does anyone have experience of Nepomuk? Any drawbacks?

Thanks again for the helpful replies, Slashdot. You continue to impress me - I doubt I would have gotten such a useful variety of responses elsewhere. I hope this discussion is useful to other folk looking for something similar.

Re:OP here

[supercrisp]

I am a researcher. I want to add my vote for "file system." The less interaction you do with most of this material, the better off you'll be. For me, important or useful material goes into a reference manager. Those files get tagged in the reference manager. At this point in my career--only four years in--that's just under 600 articles with accompanying pages of notes. Other stuff goes into folders based on broad categories. I don't do any tagging on these because find-by-content always does the job just fine. Avoid the extra work. You're not paid to be a secretary. And most of the organizing won't pay off, will become an end in itself.

Re:Gunna hate this BUT

[jd2112]

I'm working on a sharepoint add-on to allow paper documents to be processed in the same manner as electronic documents. In it's current form it's a paper shredder with a Sharepoint logo taped to it.