Document Management For Research With Annotation? 122
msimm writes "I'm currently looking for a document management system for personal and research-related use. Having looked at Alfresco and KnowledgeTree along with a slew of similar open source document management systems they seem to have a common set of features including version control, archiving, document permission/ownership and search/indexing. What I'd like, in order to help me manage my own continually growing collection of pdf/doc/odf/rtf/txt files, would be something that allowed me to view and annotate documents (and possibly collaborate/share notes) without requiring me to download, edit and re-upload each document. Obviously there are plenty of capable document management systems out there, so I really suspect I've simply missed something and am hoping someone can point me to a better way to index, search, collaborate and keep and share notes on the ever increasing glut of useful information I seem to use and collect."
Jabref? (Score:2, Insightful)
Does jabref suit your purpose : http://jabref.sourceforge.net/
Zotero (Score:4, Insightful)
About a year ago I needed a piece of software that matches your requirements. I wanted to be able to do my research from anywhere and keep track of notes and annotations in a very simple but searchable way.
Zotero is the closest thing. It's not perfect, far from it, but none of the competition came even close.
Zotero is a Firefox plugin that allows you to link or store information, be it webpages, pdf's or anything else you may see online. It's possible to group & tag your documents in various ways and there are various options for taking notes and adding annotations.
All of it is stored online so you don't need to carry anything with you. Just install the firefox plugin, enter your credentials and off you go.
Zotero (Score:3, Insightful)
Zotero is brilliant. I could go on about how I use it every day at work and it makes everything a hell of a lot easier, but instead, just check it out.
Versioning of documents it doesn't do - but that's what Mercurial is for I guess.
Bibdesk and Mendeley (Score:2, Insightful)
I use Bibdesk on the mac, and I like it. Specifically, I like that it organizes all my PDFs into folders and stores all the data in a Bibtex file. The only problem I have with it, is that it stores the paths and macosx aliases and so instead of getting a nice pathname, you get 1500+ characters long hash. I'd really like a way to convert those back to paths so I could migrate in the future if I need to.
I used Mendeley for about 10 minutes, but I was impressed. It looked really good. It's cross platform, and web based. The only reason why I'm not using it is because I already started with Bibdesk, and it just wasn't quite worth converting over. (Again the pathname issues.), but I'd recommend it.
Anything that doesn't support BibTeX is simply a non-starter.