I need a database app that will let me do this specific thing

March 24, 2024 9:17 AM

When I read a printed book for research, one of the ways I record info from it is by taking a picture of the relevant page. I want a database that will let me handle this data in a certain way.

When I'm reading a printed book for research, and I'm on the bus or in another situation where I can't easily take notes, I take a picture of the page with information I want to save.

I want to be able to put this pictures into a database of some kind that will let me link:

The picture
The text captured on the picture
The reference

And of course, linking all the notes from one book together, which I assume almost any database could do easily.

My ideal input screen would have the image, a text box, and a reference box on it. Or a link to whatever software people are using these days to output a bibliography in MLA style, which I also need.

Thanks so much. I get overwhelmed with these kinds of decisions and look forward to being told what to do.

I've been thinking of AirTable for awhile. Is this something I would find straightforward with AirTable? Or is there something else that's better?

posted by Well I never to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Zotero lets you do this for PDFs that you download off the internet, so there may be a way to integrate this with pdfs you capture yourself. Zotero is also very good at preparing bibliographies from citations. Searching around I see people asking about trying to do this with Zotero, but it doesn't seem to support easily importing pictures of single pages as it generally operates at the level of article/chapter as it's designed for research journals. It does let you easily scan in physical book ISBNs to add to your bibliography.

I am also interested in this idea so hopefully someone else has a good idea for doing page-based indexing of information. I've been doing this informally in a google doc where I just make a new paragraph for each page of note, but it's kind of awkward.
posted by JZig at 12:00 PM on March 24, 2024 [4 favorites]

The closest I know of is Readwise app (not to be confused with their "Readwise Reader" app). I use to it do OCR of pages I want the text from; the improvement over standard OCR apps is that it also captures the book info and page I'm on. That allows me to gather the information on the fly in a way that gives me the core information I'll want to review, later on.

I haven't explored generation of citations right out of ReadWise, but at least fro the above you can generate the book citation and add in the pages manually. I'm not aware of an app that does everything you want all in one, to be clear, but generating citations is something you can get pretty easily on a number of websites; it's not a massive barrier compared to get getting pages digitized in a way that gives me the ties back to books that I read.
posted by Asim at 1:36 PM on March 24, 2024

With Zotero, if you have the iPhone or iPad app, you can first scan the page(s) of the book as a PDF (with either the Files app or a third-party OCR app) and then add them as an attachment to the entry you created by scanning the book’s barcode.
posted by beryllium at 4:24 AM on March 25, 2024 [1 favorite]

You can probably get much of this with Roam. Roam is kind-of a note taking app, kind of a database, kind of a list manager. Their mobile app can take pictures and then you could annotate the "node" in which the picture lives with any metadata you'd like to add. I'm not sure about linking out to an MLA citation (but someone may have written a plug-in for that purpose).
posted by tayknight at 11:16 AM on March 25, 2024