PDF inventory software

[Bill Moran]

Daniel Underwood <djuatdelta at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm looking for a way to manage my personal collection of research
> articles.  Ideally I'd like some way to keep records on authors,
> keywords, journals, and publication years of articles (PDF files)
> downloaded onto my local drive.
> 
>  In the course of reading literature for research, it often happens
> that I find myself wanted to return to something I have previously
> read, but I only recall a few "things" about the article, often the
> author and a keyword.  Is there some inventory/database software (for
> local use only) that can be easily used for this purpose?  (The
> closest things that comes to mind (conceptually) is "image collection"
> software.)
> 
> What are some of my options here?

Just to add one more to the already list of good ideas.

What about just using an RDBMS?  These days, everyone seems to think you
have to put some fancy web front-end on a RDBMS to make it useful, but SQL
is pretty user-friendly.

PostgreSQL, in particular, has some excellent full-text searching
capabilities in the latest version.  If you use a script to export the
text from the PDF and insert into postgres, you then have a searchable
database using word-stemming and all the other features of a full-blown
search engine on steroids.

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com