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.