OK, here we go again. I am summarising 12 years+ worth of technical reports, which are increasing by the month, and likely to continue increasing for another 10 years.

Almost all of them are in Word, but some are PDFs. At the moment I probably have only about 30 rports, but some are rather large, and a search using DTsearch several years ago told me that I had over one million words, when I had far fewer reports to work with.

What I need to be able to do is to find and extract all the information related to a specific site, or animal species, and be confident I haven't missed any relevant comments.

There are also lots of tables and figures so that Orbis is out, which is a pity because Orbis can extract search in paragraph junks, which makes it useful.

As regards simply searching, then DtSearch works well, but I need something that combines good searching and browsing. I used to be an Asksam user, but found importing documents simply took up too much time. However, for this specific project I wouldn't mind importing all the reports into Asksam so that I could search, browse and manage the contents. In fact it seems an ideal task for AskSam.

However, can anyone suggest something else I should be looking at.

Thanks,

Graham

Graham -

In fact it seems an ideal task for AskSam.

I know exactly what you mean. I feel a similar need to have all my data in one place, i.e., within one software "container". Zoot is not fully suitable for this, although great for organising reams of ideas, notes, etc., in plain text (it was probably better when it still had Agent-X). Nor does the combination of having well-organised directories and subdirectories of relevant files on one's hard disk with using indexed searching via dtSearch quite do the job either.

Coincidentally, I've been re-evaluating my way of working over the vacation, but I've decided to stick with my Brainstorm, GrandView, Zoot, Net Snippets, Word 2003, dtSearch line-up for the time being. My only new decision is probably going to be to invest in Biblioscape, purely for handling references (not note-taking).

But I think there is a lot to be said for the "information bucket" approach of having EVERYTHING (htm, mht, doc, rtf, pdf, and so on) within one or a set of searchable databases, so long as the software is reliable and offers routes out for exporting individual files, sets of files, and folders.

I think your "browsing" point is an especially acute one. It's a bit like the recognition-recall memory issue: jogging one's memory by walking along the library shelves is often useful in stimulating lateral thinking.

My only reservation is whether askSam is, in practice, going to be able to do the job reliably. There is some discontent (to which I have been contributing as "DBC" in relation to Citation) on their forums about the quality of support. I was also disappointed with SurfSaver when it first came out, and this quite put me off using askSam as a receptacle for reports, etc., saved from the internet. This was using v5 of askSam, of course. I think the problems of SurfSaver have been sorted out, although it now only works with askSam v6. And asSam v6 also has its own internet downloading facilities, although I am not sure how good they are.

If you don't need to download from the web. however, askSam may be a good solution, especially as it also has good searching features (if you have the Professional version, that is). Alternatively, couldn't either Net Snippets, Contentsaver, or Surfulator be used? Their searching, browsing and managing features do seem to be getting better.

Derek