Organization of an electronic library

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rhopalocera.com, 24.06.2016 10:48

Colleagues!

I have seen many different private electronic libraries, and most of them did not satisfy me at all. There are three reasons:

1. When accumulating a solid volume of electronic publications, it is difficult to navigate the library.

2. Files are saved with key names (for example: Forster. 1940.Agrodieatus-III. pdf), which makes finding them very difficult at times (especially if abbreviations are used).

3. Files of different types are scattered (PDF files, deja vu, etc.).

When I started my electronic collection, I decided to take a different path. The database itself exists separately in the form of an Exel file, where the search for articles is very easy (the full title of the article, source, media type, etc. - all this is easily entered in the necessary fields), and the data itself is hierarchically saved to disk in the form of <Author> - <Year>. At the same time, the search for information is much shorter: for example, we need all the articles about the genus Plebeius. We know that they were written by Forster, and we also know the name of the genus. After making the appropriate search queries, we get to 22 articles stored in the library. Then it's a matter of technique-open the author and the year to which the article refers. I attach a text file with the current database and a couple of screenshots of how it all works.

I note that in addition to articles that go to the database automatically, there is a large layer of articles and books that do not fall into the database, but are stored in the library. These are primarily works on Noctuidae, Geometridae and Pyralidae (Microlepidoptera Palaearctica, Microlepidoptera Europaea, Pyralidae Europaea, Noctuidae Europaea, Geometridae Europaea and other fun books). I created separate folders for them (by family), where the literature is stored indiscriminately. I don't want to add it to the database yet, because my interest in this literature is not too strong yet, and there will be a lot of work to add it to the database (approximately 1000 - 1200 sources that have not yet been accounted for).