Help me catalogue 1000s of documents please.

December 1, 2006 4:22 AM

I am responsible for locating from the internet and cataloguing several thousand scientific articles in PDF format in order to build a documentation library. I am looking for the best way of cataloguing and publishing these articles for a small workgroup to be able to search and find articles by specific criteria.

Everyone will be running Windows XP in a networked environment so any solution will have to run under windows and not linux etc. this also rules out Sharepoint as that will only work under Windows 2003 Server (thanks Microsoft!).

I want to be able to catalogue and search these PDF's by the following criteria. There is no need for free text search on the whole article however.

1. Title
2. Abstract - ideally free text search but this is not essential
3. Authors - it must be possible to catalogue each article by multiple authors and be able to search on individual authors separately. This is an essential requirement.
4. Journal
5. Multiple keywords - it must be possible to search on each keyword separately.
6. Publication date

Ideally a user could search on any combination of fields for each document and specify multiple authors etc.

The PDF files will be located on a server which everyone will have access to - ideally the files should be exposed via HTTP but fileshares etc. would be fine as well.

My budget is pretty limited - ideally something free and open source would be great but if I found the perfect solution I think I could persuade my boss to pay for something.

I also don't have the time or resources to write something myself although I am an experienced programmer so if there is a solution which will work with a little customisation that'd be OK as well.

I look forward to your replies/comments.

posted by empedia to computers & internet (4 comments total)

CiteULike can do all of these things, I believe. It depends on which journals you are pulling the information from (they can get it from a many, but not all). You can also add a persistent URL to the article.
posted by unknowncommand at 4:36 AM on December 1, 2006

CiteULike is certainly intriguing and I'll definitely mention it to my manager however I think they will be looking for something which allows a locally maintained database.

However the features of CiteULike are exactly what I'm looking for if it could be installed locally etc.
posted by empedia at 5:07 AM on December 1, 2006

Institutions large and small use the wonderful DSpace for this sort of thing. Open source and definitely customizable.
posted by otio at 5:18 AM on December 1, 2006

I'll look into DSpace although it looks like it was really written for Linux. Any more suggestions anybody?
posted by empedia at 1:31 PM on December 2, 2006