Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

http://lifehacker.com/software/pdf/geek-to-live–organize-your-pdf-library-with-itunes-240447.php

Wow…and I’ve spent lots of time finding stuff to organize web research, but this is cool! I’ve been sold on social bookmarking sites for a couple of years now. And now I’m starting to like these various “clipping” or “notetaking” type bookmarking tools as well. However, the problem with most of them is that they do not bookmark, clip, or save/cache PDF files from library databases. Now I’m trying to teach my students that research in library databases tends to be a little more authoritative, scholary, academic, etc. than what they find on the web. And some days I can’t blame them, it is a whole heck of a lot easier to work with texts on the web, than the stuff in the library databases.

So…why not use a tool many of them already know and love, iTunes?

As I read the instructions for how to do this, they reminded me of the major drawback…it’s just an organizing plan; iTunes doesn’t have a PDF reader within it. However, the blog entry also lists the major plus for using iTunes to organize research PDFs, tagging. Currently I have all my research related PDFs saved in the files with the projects that I found them with. Now, most scholars know that they use the same resources for many projects. By tagging, instead of filing, iTunes allows you to associated the PDF with any past, present, and future project it needs to be associated with.

The one change I would make…the instructions linked to above mentions that you could leave your PDFs in files all over your computer. That is part of my problem! I’m now thinking put ALL research related, heck maybe just all, PDF files into one file folder. Then organize them within iTunes as outlined above. And then, as also mentioned in the article, use Google Desktop to search the text in the files for the exact PDF needed. (yes, you read that correctly, once Google Desktop scans all your files, it can read all the text in your PDF files). That just gave me another techno-clean up for this summer:

1. organize bookmarks in delicious
2. finish digital list of DVDs (insurance purposes, ya know)
3. dump all PDFs in one file & organize in iTunes