Thanks to my professors providing reading material for class and my own dalliances in ETSU's library I have managed to collect a fair amount to academic journal articles in PDF format. Combined with my e-books and my ever-growing pile of good old fashioned physical books I have amassed a respectable academic library for an undergraduate student. A few months ago though, I realized this library was getting out of hand, files were spread to the four winds, and I had no good way of keeping track of what articles and books I had and where they were. It was time for some organizing and consolidation.
I searched the Internet for free and/or open-source library management tools. There are some real gems out there like Evergreen and Koha, and while they claim to scaleable they are overkill for managing a personal library in my opinion. There are sites like LibraryThing, but they are geared more towards personal libraries only containing books and not journal articles and reports. When combined with the fact that you can only track 200 books before you have to start paying (albeit a small sum) LibraryThing just didn't cut it.
I considered using Zotero, a great open-source citation management suite that I've started using lately. I quickly realized that wouldn't work though since I want to keep my citations neat and easy to navigate, and by managing my entire library through the service I would clutter it with entries that I've not and likely never will cite in a paper.
After a bit of brainstorming I think I've finally figured out a system that works for me, and I'd like to share it. Your mileage may vary of course.
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How I'm keeping track of things: Springpad
Springpad is a popular online notebook service similar to Evernote (and now Google Keep I suppose). While the two are comparable, they aren't exactly the same thing. What I've done for this project can be done on Evernote, but I prefer the more visually-focused way that Springpad presents information.
Springpad allows for the creation of different notebooks. Each notebook can contain an unlimited number of separate notes. For example, here's a notebook I've created to keep track of lunch and dinner recipes.
Springpad notes can be simple rich text notes with images or other media attached, or you can choose from several special notes like shopping lists, recipes, movies, wine, or in this case, books. While geared towards actual books and not magazines or individual articles, it's flexible enough for what I need. Each "book" type notes provides spaces to put title, author(s)' name, price, page count, format, descriptions, publication date, and various other bits of bibliographic information. For organizing my library, I have chosen to use title, author name, publication date, and format to provide quick information on a click. While not enough to draft a full citation entry (that's Zotero's job!) it provides a good overview of the document it represents. Additionally for each entry that I have in PDF I have uploaded it to a cloud storage service (which I will discuss later) and appended the link to each note. Below is a screen grab of a fully complete entry.
The text in the description field is the article's abstract. I'd like to do it for every article, but many of the PDFs I have are document scans that didn't pull the text out, so until I feel up to typing abstracts out a lot of notes will probably be blank in that section.
Having all this information in notes is all well and good, but how do you keep this notebook from just becoming a big list that's a pain to sort through? The answer is simple: tags. Tags have become an organizational mainstay on the modern web, and Springpad is no different. For this notebook I created a variety of tags like the different subjects appearing in the library (in my case generally archaeology, cultural anthropology, or linguistics), the regions the article or book is applicable to, what the entry represents (i.e. a book, ebook, or journal article), and various other bits of information that allows me to quickly narrow down my library and see what literature I have available on a certain subject or area. I can also use the tags to mark which physical books I have loaned out to people and append additional information to the entry to include when and to whom I lent the book. As long as I am diligent and comprehensive in my tagging, keeping track of my library should be fairly simple.
Where I am storing all those PDFs: Box.net
Box.net is one of many cloud storage services that have emerged in recent years. There are many other ones out there like Google Drive, Microsoft Skydrive, or the extremely popular Dropbox, and any of them would work just fine for this portion. The reason I use Box.net is simply because the service provides me a lot of space. I got on with Box when they first launched, and early adopters received 50 gigs of free storage for life. Box currently provides 5 gigs of storage for free to new sign-ups, but they do special offers of 25 gigs occasionally now too. Box is accessible through the web and mobile apps, meaning I can access my files anywhere. With the storage space they provide I should be able to upload PDFs for a good long while. I am, of course, keeping local backups as well on my main computer.
Managing those files locally: calibre
I have an Amazon Kindle 3, and as such I tend to like my books in digital formats most of the time anymore. Not all of my books come directly from Amazon though (there is a vast array of classical books that any scholar should have available for free from Project Gutenberg for instance) Managing a large library of ebooks can be a chore in and of itself, especially if you are nit picky like me and like information such as tje way the author name is presented to be uniform between all your files. Using the very popular ebook management software calibre you can quickly organize, edit, and convert your ebooks, calibre also allows you to move files on and off your device and keeps track of what files are currently on the device, in your main library, or both. calibre supports a variety of formats including the various Amazon formats, MOBI, Epub, and PDF. That means I can organize and manage those backup PDFs mentioned above using calibre too.
Managing the physical books: I haven't a clue
The final issue of getting my academic library organized is what to do with the physical books. Space is a premium in my apartment, and the books are of such various sizes (from coffee table down to small handbooks) that arranging them in alphabetical order or some such on a shelf if nearly impossible (and I've only got one small bookshelf to boot). So right now the ones that aren't on the shelf are tucked away in piles. Their information will of course be entered into the Springpad notebook and their location will be tagged (I only have one location tag at the moment, "Apartment" because having an office is a distant dream). One of my professors and some of my friends have gotten custom embossing or ink seals to mark their books with so if they ever go missing there is a chance people will notice and return them. I might do something similar in the future.
I hope this has been inspiring to people. This is a work in progress and I've barely scratched the surface of getting book info into the Springpad notebook. If you've read this and have questions, feedback, or ideas I'd love to hear them!
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