Looking for information management solution

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 28, 2009 at 11:01 AM

Many thanks for the suggestions so far. In the end I checked out ConnectedText, Zoot, Ultra Recall, MyInfo, and myBase. So far I’m leaning towards Ultra Recall as it seemed to have the least steep learning curve and made it the easiest to import the folders. All I had to do was drag and drop the folder with all the sub-folders into UR, and it kept the original folder hierarchy and recognised all the files within. It seems that from now on I can annotate each folder and file and add keywords.

This is almost everything I needed, except the sorting of categories. At the moment the keywords feature seems to be the only way to sort the items according to the categories that I give. It would be nice if the categories where actually displayed on the screen and I could just click on them to sort them in alphabetic order, for instance. Granted, I haven’t had much time to fully explore UR yet, so there might be ways for me to allocate similar items to their separate folders, which would solve my problem.

doctorandus

Dr Andus wrote:
>I’d like to ask for some advice on software that could help me with the following
>problem. On my Windows XP PC I have a folder with 110 sub-folders, each entitled with
>the date (e.g. 2008_01_16) when the material that it contains was collected. This
>material is mostly MS Word or Excel documents, PDF files, occasionally sound or image
>files). I would like to get a software that would enable me to categorise and annotate
>the contents of each folder. The data is about various organisations, some of which
>are related, and this categorisation and annotation would be part of the analysis of
>my data (it’s for my PhD). Ideally this software would enable me to do this quickly
>(drag and drop data, add categories and annotations), and would also include a
>hyperlink back to the original folder and/or files, so I can drill down into the data if
>necessary.
> >Any suggestions?
> >doctorandus