For quite a while now I have been thinking about this massive archive of PDF formatted articles that has been accumulating on my hard drives for years. As it happens, I am a physical and digital packrat and the idea of having to search for these articles again one day irritates me. I spent some time tinkering about in Access and various other DB tools, trying to find a way to sort, classify, and house my articles.

Eventually I abandoned the idea of developing such a tool myself because I really just don’t have the time or the know-how to design and implement something particularly well done. The folks over at Infodoodads recently reminded me about CiteULike, so I gave it a whirl. CUL comes close to doing what I want, but there’s one critical issue that drives me bonkers. CUL does not support multi-word tags. I cannot stand the insert underscores all_over_the_place and so I abandoned the project after inserting a paltry three citations.

I am now attempting to use Connotea to achieve the same purpose and I am happily able to report that I can at least use multi-word tags, although I haven’t investigated much beyond that first feature. What I am noticing right off the bat about Connotea is that you cannot upload the actual document to your personal library, an aspect of CUL that really lends some portability to your documents. In reality I have all of these articles on both a portable drive and my stable home drive, but still…

Anyone know of a cite that blends these features? That’s what I really need.