I have my books organized fairly well. Of course, it’s not too difficult when you only have a few book shelves. What I’m having trouble with, though, is organizing my digital files. I have files ranging from systematic theology to Christian life topics to biographies to practical church helps such as forms and Bible study charts. I’ve struggled with organizing those digital files in a helpful way. I like some of the things about how Desiring God has organized their material. But I’m not convinced it’s the most helpful way for my materials. Monergism’s structure is much simpler, but I’m not sure it is big enough to encompass what I have.
So my question is, how do you organize your digital theology files?
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
There is a school of thought that says digital data should not be nor does it not need to be organised too carefully into folders and subfolders etc.
I use an Apple Mac and it works differently to Windows PC’s but they both do the same sort of thing, though the Mac is better set up for this.
I change everything into Adobe PDF format, with a reasonably logical filename and then bung it all into a folder. I then retrieve material using the Spotlight tool…..so if you roughly know the name or some of the words in the data file…you will very quickly get the file highlighted…the advantage of the mac over Pc is that the Mac indexes all the data within files on saving the file…the default setting on PC is that it has to search the drive and then the “inside” of the files when requested to do so…the Mac only has to search its index (or something like that) anyway it’s much faster…that’s the point. I think you can set up indexing in Windows Xp but not sure.
So my tip is – don’t organise…let the computer do the work for you.
JP
Not a bad idea. I especially like the part about me getting a new MacBook Pro!
Actually there are a few pieces of software available that do on a PC what Spotlight does on a Mac. I haven’t thought about that option.
My only concern with doing it that way is this. What do I do if I want to see all the resources I have available on a particular topic or passage? Do I also need to set up a section of key words or category labels in each file?
You could do that, but again I just do a spotlight search (which may return many results) and then hopefully I’ll remember roughly which ones are most relevant.
The way I would (if I wasn’t so lazy) do it is to attach a meta data (Spotlight Comments its called in the Get Info window) to each file, so take a given file I can put a note on it to say “excellent for exposition on 1 Cor. 11) or whatever and so if I spotlight any of those words it will come up pretty quickly.
Not perfect by any means, but easy!
Good stuff so far guys. A good resource is to check out Monergism.com and see how John, who manages that site, organizes the many digital files contained there. Of course this is a web site. But you might get some ideas with hierarchy.
I don’t mean to bring up how sweet the Mac is again, but the new Leopard also has Quicklook, so any files Spotlight comes up with, you can look at quickly without actually opening any applications, whether it’s a pdf, doc, ppt, spreadsheet, or whatever.
Okay, G, that was just uncalled for!
I’m thankful for my computer, but when it dies, I will then be thankful for my new Mac. 
Oh yes G…..and you can do Quicklook from Coverflow…..which is like the coolest looking file explorer thing…ever! And Wil if I convince your wife you (ye…as in Plural) need a Macbook will you convince mine?
JP
JP
Be sure your sins will find you out.
