In the aftermath of the elections, it doesn’t look as if anyone in government will be calling on me for frank and fearless advice[1] any time soon. So this seems like a good time to get my records in order. My piece on time management elicited some follow-up discussion along these lines, notably here, with followup here . For those who are looking for moderately constructive routine activities in the wake of recent catastrophes, here are some (not very organised) thoughts.
I’ve never found a satisfactory “one size fits all” solution, though I’ve acquired lots of experience in the associated search. For my main bibliographic file, I’m using a Mac-only product called Bookends, the product of a one-man show called Sonny Software. I tend to go for obscure products like this[2]. The industry standard at the moment is Endnote, but I had some problems with this (can’t remember exactly what) and decided not to adopt it when I shifted from Procite a couple of years ago. When I get time, I plan to work out how to use BiBTeX – Bookends produces output in this format. The physical copies of papers I’ve accumulated are stored in filing cabinets, and marked in Bookends. I’m also trying to keep my PDF files in a similar fashion, but I’m well behind on that.
Email is another gigantic database in itself. I’ve been using Eudora, which has pretty good filtering and search capabilities, but I’m now dipping my toe into Google’s Gmail – I’m just a bit worried about Google having access to all my mail, black and otherwise.
Then I’ve got a bunch of Filemaker databases. As well as the usual contact lists and so on, I’ve got a system of two linked databases which is supposed to keep track of my articles, where they have been submitted and rejected, and so on. As I’m both quite active and somewhat out of the mainstream in economics (both geographically and ideologically), I tend to get a lot of rejections, and I live in fear that I’ll resubmit a paper to a journal where it’s already been rejected. The system also lets me know how long things have been in process, so I can send polite reminder notes in cases of extreme slowness (I normally wait a year, but unlike some authors I’ve heard of, I don’t mark the event with a birthday card).
If I can summarise my views on this kind of organisational stuff, they are
* Something is better than nothing
* The best is the enemy of the good
* Filing is good if it provides a constructive activity during dry spells, downtime and so on, bad if it becomes a displacement activity. If you’re involved in any way with blogs you already have more than enough avenues for displacement activity.
Anyway, back to my new working paper database, which is going to make all my stuff available on RePEc
fn1. They’ll get it anyway, of course, but only in my spare time, and only through channels like blogs and opinion columns
fn2. I also like Nisus Writer as an alternative to Word.
John Quiggin 
I’m not an academic or well organised but I do keep a lot of official reports and stuff I have written myself and background /field notes etc. I have only just (almost) stopped searching for the perfect system.
I rely a lot on a kind of photographic memory. That is I can generally remember that a report had a greenish cover and was a small size and was filed in that pile over there on the shelf or in that red handled box. Or that something was on a right hand page about 3/4 of the way through the report.
I used to have a free desktop version of Alta Vista search engine that was great in that it would throw up stuff in the normal html linked format to stuff on the network and hard drive. Once it did its initial cateloguing taking about 6 hours it required very little to keep up with everything. It would search text (content) as well as titles and could do a refined search. One of its great beauties was it would also search Eudora archives, very important as a lot of information is stored in email. It was great to have it all presented, email, pdf, documents, spreadsheets etc on the one page for one search, all hyperlinked to Hard drive. Sadly it had some bugs at one stage and I wasn’t able to find the original to re-install. I would still go back to it now if I could find a copy.
I still use Eudora for all its facilities and familiarity. It is especially useful as Eudora will work off a CD or DVD. So I can archive years of email on a CD or DVD with a copy of eudora on the disc and access it anywhere and presumably forever.
I just recently installed the new free Google for workstations which works well enough except that it doesnt do Eudora at all and I don’t think will do networks.
Hard copies of reports etc I now store in see through plastic stackable lidded boxes I get from the supermarket for about $8 on special. They have different coloured handles so it makes it a bit easier to find stuff. I genrally store by project. I make a CD or DVD of all data, including email, associated with the project and toss it in the box. The boxes can even be stored in a garage as the are dustproof etc and can be thrown in the boot of the car if needed on the road.
For some stuff I was using Filemaker and it was good as it wil also do images and is easy to use. But requires too much effort to maintain.
Latex seems good but is really for geeks only.
All that is really needed is something like the Alta Vista free desktop network search engine that will also search Eudora emails and pdfs and canbe run off a DVD or CD. Then everything would be easily stored, searched and portable.
I’m still happy to try anything that might be worthwhile. I am convinced that it should be a search engine type thing that will allow for database type entries and aggregation too.
John, I’ve written my honours thesis, several papers, and now my PhD thesis (almost complete…) in LaTeX, in computer science rather than economics, so perhaps I can comment on your interest in LaTeX/Bibtex.
As a geek, there is nothing like the combination of LaTeX, BibTeX, Emacs and associated small utilities to manage citations. However, I have found that a vanishingly small number of people, including others in my department, are prepared to learn how to use them. This is a bit of a pain in the arse for joint work, because it means you’re the only one who can do the formatting and layout.
If you have to lay out complex mathematics, it is immensely more powerful and convenient than Word’s tools for doing so.
Customizing layout can be a bit of a black art. If you are laying out works for a magazine, in contrast to a journal, it is simply not suitable.
But don’t get me wrong. If you’re prepared to put some time in to learn, these tools are far superior for producing academic documents than any thing Microsoft and other commercial software makers have created.
I was about to talk about LaTeX etc but Robert beat me to it. I learnt to use it and its associated bits (although I prever vi/vim, but we won’t get into that debate) several years ago and I’ve found that using it is so much easier than trying to wrangle Word to do what I want. After changing machines I just set it up on my windows machine last week and it was easy. My roommate uses LaTeX etc on a Mac. And although I initially learnt it several years ago, it was relatively painless, with the right references to help.
My background is in health science and I am not particularly geeky.
That should have read “… several years ago, I remember it was relatively painless to learn, …”. Apologies.
In regards to email, yes it certainly is another huge database — one that I have been trying for a long time to manage effectively — but I still haven’t managed to implement a perfect solution.
I have relevant emails stretching back to 1996 kept in a large “Mailbox” format (one file per email) accessible via a local IMAP server on a Linux machine, but the search facilities of this are not ideal. I really want something where I can both keep things organised neatly by category as well as have a powerful (and speedy) search facility over the whole thing. Something with a decent index would be good, which leads me to think about converting it all to a real SQL database at some point.
This is a problem that I believe more and more people are going to have as they accumulate more years of ‘online-ness’. Then again, maybe most people will simply delete old emails, but I think if you’ve got the hard drive space, use it!
On the topic of filing and finding things, I’ve just started using Google Desktop (http://desktop.google.com/), which indexes everything I’ve produced with a Microsoft product, and beats the heck out of any Windows search tool. The only downside is that it steals 2G of my hard disk for its index, but I’m happy to expend that to save 5 minutes a day searching for files. JQ, you sound like you don’t use many Microsoft programs, so maybe this isn’t the best option, but for anyone who does, I can heartily recommend it.
There is an article on some options for desktop searching here in todays AGE IT section.