I am a digital pack rat. I have 4000+ PDF files as I have a tendency to save to disk rather than print, and I like to build up an archive around my various marketing papers, books and other research. The downside has been that I originally saved files by project keyword (eg telepresence_04), or by paper title (Technology and its impact on polychronic time use). I’ve now migrated to saving by author/year (Price, Leong and Ryan 2005). Renaming the entire library is a task that’s underway in serious earnest (and will result in Smith 2006a to Smith2006z I suspect), and I’m working through various methods to make the management possible.

Currently under trial is the Adobe Bridge software that comes with the professional version of most Adobe packages other than Adobe Acrobat. It’s handling previewing and renaming really well in the first instance, and it looks to be the goods for managing a large PDF library. I can’t understand why it’s not part of the Acrobat Suite, but since I have CS3, I have the whole Adobe toybox.

What I need next is an automated PDF metadata tagger. Scan for keywords (and flag the image only scans I have in the collection), and append a tag cloud the PDF file.