Ask HN: File Management Software for PhD

7 points by archmikhail 3 years ago | 9 comments

For my PhD I am accumulating thousands pdf and word documents from with lecture notes, transcriptions, powerpoint slides, and handouts.

I also have several thousand recordings of lectures & interviews.

I am searching for a software which would allow me to upload all of these, cross-match them, tag them, add metadata, and be able to search and organize them by date, location, audience, or topic.

Ideally, this software would enable the creation of composite objects made up of multiple recordings, documents, tags, and metadata. For example, a composite object could be a lecture a person gave in Argentina last May and it would include:

- A recording from the speaker's iPhone - A recording from the sound system where the Spanish translation is more clear - A recording of a French translation made recently - A pdf document of the speaker's notes - A pdf document of someone's transcription in English - A pdf document of a machine-generated transcription in Spanish - A brief summary - Tags such as: Big Data, Twitter, MongoDB - Metadata such as: - Delivered: May 15, 2022 - Event: DataCrunch Conference - Audience: University Students

An added bonus would be the ability to have user accounts with different access permissions to view, download, and edit these listings.

Does such a software exist? I've been searching and searching and haven't found one. I used to write software, so worst case I could maybe make it myself.

photoGrant 3 years ago |

Are you self hosting? FileRun is pretty good at getting you close.

https://github.com/filerun

archmikhail 3 years ago | |

It doesn't have to be self hosing.

FileRun looks promising. It looks like I'd have to develop the composite object feature, but there's enough already here to make that a less-time consuming task.

jacquesm 3 years ago |

This plug-in may be helpful:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/memex/

Ambar/Yaci/Cider may be useful as well depending on your workflow.

Another option would be to use something like drive.google.com.

archmikhail 3 years ago | |

Thanks for the suggestions, but I don't see how those are very relevant.

jacquesm 3 years ago | | |

Maybe I am not correctly envisioning your usecase, but it seems like we have fairly similar problems from your description and these all help me to achieve my goals pretty much every week over and over again.

Apologies if I misunderstood the challenges you are dealing with.

satya71 3 years ago |

Use Zotero ( https://www.zotero.org/ )

It also integrates with your library to download papers.

account-5 3 years ago | |

^ This ^

Brilliant software. And citation format too. Browser and (libre)office plugins

idlefeature 3 years ago | |

^Yes, Zotero is definitely worth a look!

nashashmi 3 years ago |

I think Notion has what you are looking for. But that thing is a monster in terms of features. And I am still trying to figure out how best to use it.