Sonny Software

I am using Bookends for reference storage/lookup, and its ability to generate bibliographies easily. However, one major feature for me is the ability to easily link PDF files.

My typical workflow is "What was that study again that suggested general anesthetics were better than regional anesthetics for ankle fractures"? I then look up "ankle" or "fracture" in Bookends, click on the appropriate reference, and then call up the PDF with a couple of clicks. Easy!

I download references from the Reference Miner app, drag and drop them into Bookends, and then go through my university's proxy server to obtain the reprint (PDF), then I drag this onto the reference - it nicely asks me if it should move it to my attachments folder, and I accept, since this means that backing up is a simple matter of copying a) the database file itself, and b) the Attachments folder in its entirety. But I digress... Importantly for me, The PDF always has a non-descript name such as 00445dfes233.pdf.

My suggestion: Attaching these PDFs is not as streamlined as it could be. I think it would be great to be able to drag and drop a PDF on the reference, and have Bookends suggest to rename the file as it is moving the PDF - based on the authors, journal, and date fields already entered into the database. To extend this idea a bit further, one could envision an iTunes-like "Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized" option whereby all articles from a certain journal were automatically moved into a sub-folder named after the journal, or the PDFs were sub-organized by year, then month, or something similar. I hope you get my drift.

Would anyone else like this? I see Bookends as a very powerful reference manager and bibliographer, but its potential as a PDF organizer for academics is huge, and I believe many more people would be interested in the product if there were just a few more touches added to PDF management. I'm sure others here can expand or clarify my ideas...

Hi prop,

All good ideas!

Bookends 8 has already anticipated much of this:

1. You can have subfolders in the attachments folder (named by journal if you like). You can select which one to use when you drop.

2. Files are automatically given unique names if necessary (by the addition of a random number at the end). No more naming conflicts.

3. You can always find an attachment by right-clicking (Control-clicking) on its name in Bookends -- it will be displayed in the Finder if you want.

I've thought of providing a name as you suggested, but am not sure it's much of an advantage, since the name of the file is irrelevant. Bookends does the work of keeping track of it.

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon,

That's great news. So, in version 8, when I right-click on the bulleted Keyword with the PDF filename, it'll give me an option to "Show in Finder", or something like that? I can't do that now, can I?

Thanks for a great program - I'm recommending it to all of my colleagues!

prop wrote:That's great news. So, in version 8, when I right-click on the bulleted Keyword with the PDF filename, it'll give me an option to "Show in Finder", or something like that?

Yes, that's exactly how it works.

I can't do that now, can I?

No.

Thanks for a great program - I'm recommending it to all of my colleagues!

Thanks.

Jon
Sonny Software

I like these suggestions. However, I also think that Bookends should allow sensible renaming of PDFs. It provides built in sensible redundancy. If something should happend to a bookends database (I know backup backup backup) then unrenamed PDFs are useless.

Another nice approach would be to have bookends or miner harvest the reference information from the PDF itself. Thus a collection of PDFs could be used to generate a series of references directly.

Nigel

Nigel wrote:I like these suggestions. However, I also think that Bookends should allow sensible renaming of PDFs. It provides built in sensible redundancy. If something should happend to a bookends database (I know backup backup backup) then unrenamed PDFs are useless.

It's not a bad idea, and as I've said, I've toyed with it. I'll probably implement something along these lines.

Another nice approach would be to have bookends or miner harvest the reference information from the PDF itself. Thus a collection of PDFs could be used to generate a series of references directly.

It would be nice, but beside having to read in the pdf data, there is no uniformity of how documents are arranged. How can you unambiguously identify the author, for example? It is basically unformatted (or arbitrarily formatted) text.

Identifying the author/editor/date and such in Bookends is, on the other hand, a snap.

Jon
Sonny Software