I have been having fun recently indexing PDF files.
For the pasts six months or so I have been keeping the articles I've
read in a pile, and I was rather amazed at the size of the pile. It
was about a foot tall. When I read these articles I "actively" read
them -- meaning, I write, scribble, highlight, and annotate the text
with my own special notation denoting names, keywords, definitions,
citations, quotations, list items, examples, etc. This active reading
process: 1) makes for better comprehension on my part, and 2) makes
the articles easier to review and pick out the ideas I thought were
salient. Being the librarian I am, I thought it might be cool ("kewl")
to make the articles into a collection. Thus, the beginnings of
Highlights & Annotations: A Value-Added Reading List.
The techno-weenie process for creating and maintaining the content is
something this community might find interesting:
1. Print article and read it actively.
2. Convert the printed article into a PDF
file -- complete with embedded OCR --
with my handy-dandy ScanSnap scanner. [1]
3. Use MyLibrary to create metadata (author,
title, date published, date read, note,
keywords, facet/term combinations, local
and remote URLs, etc.) describing the
article. [2]
4. Save the PDF to my file system.
5. Use pdttotext to extract the OCRed text
from the PDF and index it along with
the MyLibrary metadata using Solr. [3, 4]
6. Provide a searchable/browsable user
interface to the collection through a
mod_perl module. [5, 6]
Software is never done, and if it were then it would be called
hardware. Accordingly, I know there are some things I need to do
before I can truely deem the system version 1.0. At the same time my
excitment is overflowing and I thought I'd share some geekdom with my
fellow hackers. Fun with PDF files and open source software.
[1] ScanSnap - http://tinyurl.com/oafgwe
[2] MyLibrary screen dump - http://infomotions.com/tmp/mylibrary.png
[3] pdftotext - http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/
[4] Solr - http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
[5] module source code - http://infomotions.com/highlights/Highlights.pl
[6] user interface - http://infomotions.com/highlights/highlights.cgi
--
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
--
Eric Lease Morgan
Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department
Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame
(574) 631-8604
