Your Information in ?The Cloud? ? Safe, Secure, Available or Not?

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 22, 2010 at 12:30 AM

>I started trying Surfulator out for this today.
>This
>is my work flow:
> >Open PDF, copy title. Close PDF.
>Make a new article (texts and
>authors version) in a relevant folder in Surfulator.
>Paste title into “title”
>field.
>Drag and drop PDF file into “attachments” field.
>Surfulator asks if I want to
>paste or make link.
>I tell it to paste.
>Move the copy of the PDF in the original folder
>into the waste basket. (This step would probably not be necessary
>if I cut/paste PDF
>in rather than drag/drop it in)
>Add whatever keywords or notes that are
>appropriate.
>Repeat with next PDF…
> >JasonE

Thanks for clarifying. I also have over a 1000 PDFs, so I’m always on the look-out for new ways of organising them. However, it sound like Surfulater would be rather time-consuming to use to organise hundreds or thousands of PDFs.

Fortunately most of my PDFs are academic articles and so it’s easy to download bibliographic metadata as well as to organise with EndNote. Indeed, the latest generation of EndNote, Mendeley and probably other bibliographic software now can automatically extract metadata directly from PDF files. It’s not always perfect but involves a lot fewer steps then let’s say doing the same with Surfulater. On the other hand in Surfulater you have the benefit of tree hierarchies, while in EndNote all you can do is groups. It would be great if Surfulater could import academic bibliographic data and PDFs with one click… It would become a serious rival to EndNote (with its hierarchies and tags).