Delicious for pdfs?

December 20, 2009 11:55 AM

How can I organize offline pdfs on windows so that they're easy to find offline using a standard browser? In a perfect world, it would be like delicious, but for pdfs. Tags, sortable by tags, compact display. Endnote and Wordpress are the available tools.

This is on Windows. There is an offline wordpress blog. There are a bunch of pdfs in folders on a shared drive. I wish I could have something like delicious, where anybody who has access to the shared drive could look for the pdfs by putting in tags. The listings brought up would be linked to the pdf files.

So with Endnote, Wordpress and a bunch of pdf files, how can I create an index that allows the pdfs to be searched for easily, by subject, tag, author, etc using a standard browser? A single page could be created on the wordpress blog with a list of all the pdfs, with keywords. A control+f search could be used to locate useful pdfs. But that would not be sortable. The wordpress blog already has entries, so entering each pdf as a separate entry would not work - tags would give you things other than links to the pdf files. An additional wordpress blog solely for the pdfs is not an option.

Example: person x says "I wonder about salamanders' tongues." Uses Internet Explorer or Firefox to go to the page. Tag search-animals. Nothing. Tag search amphibians. Tag search amphibians+anatomy. Brings up 5 locally linked pdfs. Person x wants more- tag search for salamander brings up 30 results. To get just recent results, tag search salamander+2009.

If there were some way to get some code from delicious, put it into a single page on the wordpress blog and have it mimic delicious, that would be perfect.

Any ideas? The process of entering in all the information will be arduous and time consuming, so I want the final product to be worth it.

posted by furious to computers & internet (9 answers total)

I don't understand why you need to use Wordpress and Endnote for this. Is this a requirement or just your idea of a solution?

Anyways if you want to search a bunch of PDF files make sure they're indexed (digital PDFs are, scanned ones need to be ocr'ed, Acrobat can batch-ocr). Then configure your Windows desktop search to index them. Use any PDF editor to tag them (again Acrobat can do the job). Does this give you what you need?

Additionally if everybody has Acrobat I think there's a way to create a collection of files, index them with Acrobat and then search them.
posted by oxit at 12:10 PM on December 20, 2009

Mendeley is aimed at organizing research papers, but it's got search and tags and other goodies.
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 12:22 PM on December 20, 2009

Oh, using a browser. Nevermind.
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 12:32 PM on December 20, 2009

Have you looked at Zotero?
posted by sophist at 12:38 PM on December 20, 2009

oxit, the adobe search is way too slow. The windows desktop search is too slow and resource intensive. I also would like to be able to see an index of all pdfs (title/author/source/keywords) as well. Mendeley looks nice but is an additional application that would mean anyone who wanted to access the pdfs would have to download and install.
posted by furious at 12:41 PM on December 20, 2009

I have looked at zotero - it's firefox only, and this needs to work for Internet Explorer.
posted by furious at 12:43 PM on December 20, 2009

JabRef is a free alternative to Endnote, maybe it supports a shared index file?
posted by oxit at 1:14 PM on December 20, 2009

I use Google Desktop to search my computer rather than Windows Explorer. It seems way better.
posted by b33j at 2:41 PM on December 20, 2009

Mendeley has a web interface, too, so you wouldn't have to install it on all computers--just the one uploading the pdf files. I doubt the web interface would be much faster than the adobe search or windows desktop search, though.. Still, if you upload your pdfs, I believe it will give you full-text search in addition to tags, etc.
posted by wondercow at 8:00 PM on December 20, 2009