batch download was RE: Olivia Judson

["Pikas, Christina K." <Christina.Pikas@jhuapl.edu>]

Bernie said:

"Maybe there's room for a personal information management system 
for scholars that allows researchers to define how downloaded 
files should be named and organized...something that allows the 
"driver" to specify how things should work "under the hood"? (For 
all I don't know, there may already be software that does this.)"

Quosa, and the quosa add in that's part of ScienceDirect and 
Scopus does this.  It's actually quite nifty.

I keep "testing" it by accident in Scopus, because "download" in 
another major database means citation to RefWorks instead of full 
text pdf.

Christina K. Pikas
R.E. Gibson Library & Information Center
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

________________________________________
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu On Behalf Of B.G. Sloan [bgsloan2@yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, January 05, 2009 7:33 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Olivia Judson

Joe Esposito said:

"But, Bernie, the researcher shouldn't have to do this.  The 
system should do it. The mark of a well-designed car is that the 
owner/driver never, ever opens the hood."

The point is well-taken regarding cars. I've never once popped 
open the hood of my 2005 Honda Accord, and I'm happy with that. 
But I'm not sure it applies to scholarly communication.

I think a researcher should WANT to have control over how their 
files (paper or electronic) are named and organized. Everyone has 
their own idiosyncracies when it comes to personal information 
management, so there's no one-size-fits-all solution. A solution 
that works for some will certainly confuse others.

Maybe there's room for a personal information management system 
for scholars that allows researchers to define how downloaded 
files should be named and organized...something that allows the 
"driver" to specify how things should work "under the hood"? (For 
all I don't know, there may already be software that does this.)

Bernie Sloan
Sora Associates
Bloomington, IN


--- On Sun, 1/4/09, Joseph J. Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Joseph J. Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Olivia Judson
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Date: Sunday, January 4, 2009, 7:40 PM
>
> But, Bernie, the researcher shouldn't have to do this. The
> system should do it.  The mark of a well-designed car is that
> the owner/driver never, ever opens the hood.
>
> Joe Esposito
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@yahoo.com>
> To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
> Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 12:37 PM
> Subject: Re: Olivia Judson
>
>> Olivia Judson's 12/16 NY Times blog seems rather uninformed.
>> Her big gripe seems to be the naming conventions used for PDF
>> files:
>>
>> "The journal articles arrive with file names like 456330a.pdf
>> or sd-article121.pdf. Keeping track of what these are, what I
>> have, where I've put them, which other papers are related to
>> them, is hopeless. Attempting to replicate my old way of doing
>> things, but on my computer - so, electronic versions of papers
>> in electronic folders - didn't work, I think because I
>> couldn't see what the papers actually were."
>>
>> As a number of commenters on her blog pointed out, she easily
>> could have renamed the PDF files as she downloaded them so
>> that the file names indicated author/title information. This
>> would have solved her problem of not knowing "what the papers
>> actually were".
>>
>> For someone with such great intellectual/scientific curiosity,
>> Judson seems surprisingly unimaginative when it comes to
>> scholarly communication.
>>
>> Bernie Sloan
>> Sora Associates
>> Bloomington, IN