[sanford]

I'm looking for something that can index and search a variety of documents -- pdfs, saved web pages, MS Word and Excel documents, Nisus and/or Mellel documents, Circus Ponies notebooks, and perhaps Macjournal files and blog entries locally stored by Ecto. I have a book project coming up that's going to involve *a lot* of research, a lot of stored documents and snippets of information, a lot of anecdotal reflections, just a bunch of research material, some of it quite technical, that I'll need to readily reference.

Before you say DevonThink, I've tried DevonThink, and I find it unwieldy and un-Mac-like. I'm not saying I won't cave in and use it, but is there another research material manager like DevonThink out there? I don't really need it do the sorts of things that Devon claims, like making relative connections between data sets and other sorts of logical leaps -- I try to let my head do those things. But I do need something that can catalog and search all this stuff I'll be collecting.

[Mithras]

Finder? Plus maybe one or more of the Spotlight-extension tools like Meta 2.0, SmartComments, or (king in my book) SpotMeta?

[sanford]

I don't disagree that would work or come close to working but I'm looking for a unified tool. Or something that makes me feel it's unified.

[sanford]

Originally Posted by Mithras 

Finder? Plus maybe one or more of the Spotlight-extension tools like Meta 2.0, SmartComments, or (king in my book) SpotMeta?

You know, this *is* going to work -- or some combination of different kids of note-taking and biblography software and spotlight plug-ins.

Thanks.

[infowarrior]

You may want to consider the shareware MyNotes product, or the commercial bibliography products like EndNote or Bookends.

I use both Bookends and MyNotes for keeping my research materials organized and collected as a PhD student, so a similar solution might be helpful for you, too.