I’m happy to announce a new release of DocuLib on OPAM, a lightweight and easy to use GUI for locally managing metadata for books, textbooks, and articles (kind of like Zotero). This release is mostly for minor fixes but I want to take the opportunity to advertise DocuLib again.
Its core features are
- facilitating looking up metadata with an interface to openlibrary.org, semanticscholar.org, and bibtex references through crossref.org
- automatically detecting duplicates (by md5 hash), file renamings, and files moved between libraries without losing metadata
- keeping track of authors, title, tags, personal notes, date, DOI/ISBN
- error permissive search
For a full list of changes see CHANGES
Feel free to make suggestions in the comments!
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Could you comment a bit more on the comparison to zotero? Are there certain features in doculib that you can’t easily achieve in zotero?
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The biggest difference is the way data is stored:
- Zotero puts a priority on metadata entries where a physical file is a child of that entry if it exists, whereas DocuLib entries are one-to-one with physical files on your computer
- files added to Zotero are either stored in a Zotero data directory (over which you have no control) or a link to a file on your computer (which you have to keep track of manually, so clearly not the preferred method), whereas DocuLib files are stored in libraries, of which you can have multiple. A library is a directory containing files you want DocuLib to index, but metadata for that library is also stored in that library.This means libraries are portable, so you can share them or sync them independently of DocuLib.
- Zotero stores metadata in a database, whereas DocuLib stores metadata as json files one-to-one with the corresponding document
So in short, use DocuLib if you are a document hoarder and want local control over your files. I’d say creating bibliographic references is not the primary focus of DocuLib, whereas it is for Zotero.
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