Re: [O] Organizing a collection of papers

[Frank]

Victor Miller <victorsmiller <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> I've just started using org-mode, and so far find it quite
> useful. I have a very large collection of technical papers in a
> directory tree, and I'd like to go through them and index them
> through org-mode. What I'd like is to have a way of going through
> them and look at the unannotated ones, and annotate them one by
> one. I imagine doing this by first making up a file of links like
> [[xxx.pdf][not done yet]], and then being presented with the not
> done ones, glancing at them and deciding how what annotations to
> put in. In addition I'd like to add tags. What I'd really like is
> to be able to make up new tags on the fly. Has anyone done
> anything like this in org-mode?

I've used org-mode about a year and a half, and I don't think it's the best
application for what you describe.  There are several packages available to do
this; the one I've used most often and successfully is Zotero (zotero.org). 
This is a browswer plug-in which implements a very nice database for your
papers.  At this point, I've indexed 1092 papers (PDFs, web pages and other
materials).  In some cases, I have multiple files attached to each of them.

Zotero helps me manage the PDFs I have already, and makes it non unusual for me
to add a few dozen to my collection, all nicely cross-referenced and ready for
citations using Word or Latex.  Once you realize how easy it is to get from a
google scholar result to another PDF in your database, and the database entry is
completely ready to support insertion as a citation, as a footnote or
end-note,... this gets very addictive.  I can't imagine any org-mode package
accelerating the process of finding, displaying, indexing and citing sources as
much as Zotero does for me.