by Peter Nollert
October 5, 2010 14:08
Over the past two years I've systematically reduced the amount of printed paper in my office as well as in my private life. The idea behind this effort is that 'going digital' with all my documents will make it simpler to store and quickly find information that I need. This is work in progress where the crucial software elements that stuck are Sync Toy (general file housekeeping), PICASA (automatic archiving of images) and Google Desktop (searches everything I have on my PC; yes - I'm a PC).
The most recent addition to this toolset is Mendeley. This is a PDF file organization tool that's devised specifically for researchers to archive, annotate and share their PDF articles. To say the least, I'm very impressed with Mendeley's utility. Within a short period of time Mendeley has helped me to aggregate and organize all of my (currently 642 and growing library of) PDF documents. The functionality goes well beyond a traditional Reference Manager. Features are here, the ones that I like particularly are:
- making notes within PDFs,
- sharing libraries over the web,
- backing up my own collection of articles,
- cross-talk with Zotero (a Firefox-based reference manager),
- cross-platform compatibility (I have Mendeley installed on Windows 7 and on iPhone/iPod touch, and use it via the web browser interface - works seamlessly so far) and
- search functionality.
Here's a quick primer to Mendeley:
Mendeley Teaching Presentation
Mendeley : the best research tool since streak-seeding?
There's even a social media facette too; here's my Mendeley profile - friend me if you'd like:
Oh - and did I mention that Mendeley is available for free?
Cheers,
Peter