Book People Archive

Why can't I manage [my text collection] like MP3s?

Thanks, Bill, for the paper reference for "Why can't I manage academic
papers like MP3s?"  It's interesting to consider
its call for the need to be able to share citations easily
in the light of CiteuLike (www.citeulike.org) and similar services.
I gather they didn't come out or get big until after this paper came out,
since they're not mentioned in it.

CiteuLike looks useful-- I don't use it myself at present,
but we've seen enough people using such social bookmarking
services that our library is implementing it own tagging system
(PennTags), and it seems to be getting
some fans even before it's out of beta.  (Sure, people can just use
del.icio.us, but PennTags allows smarter use of Penn-specific metadata
and services, and is designed to support curricular uses like
annotated bibliographies and reading lists.)

But even services like these fall short of the "personal libraries"
that many people have for music and that would also be useful for
texts (whether you're a scholar or just an avid reader).  The paper
touches on some of the reasons those haven't yet become easy to manage,
As the paper notes, it's partly because of de-facto standardization in
formats (note the title talks about "MP3s" rather than songs, but "academic
papers" rather than PDFs or any other specific format that's clearly
dominated), and partly because of metadata and content are more closely
coupled in the music world.  (I suspect differences in the social norms
concerning copyright, which aren't the same as the legal norms, may have
something to do with how common it is to couple content closely
with metadata.)

It's also partly because there's
widely used software for managing music libraries, such as iTunes,
but nothing really at the same level for texts.  Sure, there's
software for managing citations by themselves (the paper mentions
EndNote and a few others).  And lots of companies producing etexts
in specific formats have produced software that manages "libraries"
in those formats.  (The most recent one I saw was in ThoutReader, and
it looks useful, but again only deals with texts in its own formats.)
If everyone agrees to put out texts in the same formats, or if all
a particular reader deals with are texts in one format family, tools like
these could be enough, but I don't see that degree of standard-settling
occurring any time really soon.  Nor should we have to depend on that,
really.

I'm still hoping for something that will let me, as an individual user
and not as a librarian, sensibly and seamlessly (to the extent possible)
organize, reuse, and share texts I get in a variety of
formats from all kinds of different places.  There are some interesting
research projects out there along these lines-- I've been looking in
at Berkeley's Scholar's Box project from time to time, for instance--
but nothing yet that's reached mass appeal and adoption, at least not
above the level of file folders (and more recently desktop search).

Does anyone know of some good candidates for such a system, or ideas on
what features the system should have or how it should implement them?
Or do people find their existing operating systems and tools adequate
for managing their personal text collections?

(Note that this is somewhat different from questions that's come
up here before on what *viewer* and authoring fuctions should exist in
an ebook reader.  This is focusing on tools for managing and sharing
personal *libraries*, both the cites and the texts.)

John