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Snippet/archive/library tool
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Posted by Graham Rhind
May 10, 2007 at 02:18 PM
Hello all,
The next stage in my attempts at organising myself is to find a tool to allow easy searching and access of my text and documents archive.
The situation is that, using PaperPort, I have scanned thousands of documents and images which are now on my hard disk, mainly as pdf files, and organised into folders. I also have (Word) document files of older articles and books, and various image scans.
I’d like to get this data into a program so that I could access relevant material using keywords. And extra would be if that program could also be used to sort and output that information, but that’s not essential. Basically, I spend too much time searching files for old pearls of wisdom or having to think them up again. I want to avoid the “now, where did I see that screendump from .....?” and then having to spend hours searching.
I have UltraRecall, which is disappointing to me in this respect as it has some irritating limitations on the size of directories it imports and simply doesn’t always do what it says on the box (and, of course, being UR, without error message). I could use WhizFolders for the text snippets, but it can’t handle the pdf or image files easily. I bought IdeaMason when it was recently on Bitsdujour, but I haven’t tried it yet and don’t want to invest the time at the moment if it’s not the solution.
Does anybody have any suggestions for me? By the way, it needs to be very robust - more so than UR, for example, because of the thousands of documents involved.
Thanks in advance!
Graham
Posted by Jack Crawford
May 10, 2007 at 02:28 PM
Hello Graham
If you have a large number of documents in different formats already organised into folders, you could just use a good indexer such as dtSearch or X1 to find what you want when you need it. X1 is now free.
Or am I missing something crucial?
Jack
Posted by Graham Rhind
May 10, 2007 at 02:51 PM
Hello Jack,
I have X1 and, after posting, I also realised that I can easily use PaperPort to search as well. I suppose what I’m missing is depth and quality of search, and ease of use of returned information.
Using PaperPort, for example, if I look for “Spanish given names”, first of all it gives me false positives (because it cannot properly OCR non-English data); and the data is not highly keyworded, so I may have to look through 20 documents to find the relevant details, and the search text isn’t highlighted. Also, it doesn’t (always) index as it scans, so I need to re-index after adding new documents, and that is agonisingly slow.
I think I’d like to be able to view the returned texts easily and be able to give each document a powerful set of keywords. Also I’d like to create a parallel snippets data system whereby I can snip my articles into paragraphs and store those, so that I can find these snippets and quotes without having to dredge through articles.
The dreaded ADM and IdeaMason come to mind when I formulate these ideas. I’m wondering if IM (I won’t touch ADM again) is a good way to go, or whether this is just too much wishful thinking ....
Graham
Jack Crawford wrote:
>Hello Graham
>
>If you have a large number of documents in different formats already
>organised into folders, you could just use a good indexer such as dtSearch or X1 to find
>what you want when you need it. X1 is now free.
>
>Or am I missing something
>crucial?
>
>Jack
Posted by Tom S.
May 10, 2007 at 03:04 PM
Graham Rhind wrote:
>I think I’d like to be able to
>view the returned texts easily and be able to give each document a powerful set of
>keywords. Also I’d like to create a parallel snippets data system whereby I can snip my
>articles into paragraphs and store those, so that I can find these snippets and quotes
>without having to dredge through articles.
Graham,
My gut feeling is that you are looking for something more elegant but I do have a rough solution for you. In Windows XP, if you right click on the icon for your document and go to the “Summary” tab you will see fields for “Categories”, “Keywords”, and “Comments”. I have been known to keep text files on my desktop with categories and keywords listed for easy copying and pasting. The “Comments” field could be a place to put your snippets. These fields are searchable, at least with Windows Desktop Search. The other indexing search programs like X1 might do it as well.
Again, not terribly elegant but it is (almost disappointingly) simple.
Tom S.
Posted by Tom S.
May 10, 2007 at 03:10 PM
Tom S. wrote:
>Graham,
>
>My gut feeling is that you are looking for something
>more elegant but I do have a rough solution for you. In Windows XP, if you right click on
>the icon for your document and go to the “Summary” tab you will see fields for
>“Categories”, “Keywords”, and “Comments”.
Ummm. Sorry. I meant right click, choose “Properties”, then go to the “Summary” tab.
Tom S,