I have been having fun recently indexing PDF files. For the pasts six months or so I have been keeping the articles I've read in a pile, and I was rather amazed at the size of the pile. It was about a foot tall. When I read these articles I "actively" read them -- meaning, I write, scribble, highlight, and annotate the text with my own special notation denoting names, keywords, definitions, citations, quotations, list items, examples, etc. This active reading process: 1) makes for better comprehension on my part, and 2) makes the articles easier to review and pick out the ideas I thought were salient. Being the librarian I am, I thought it might be cool ("kewl") to make the articles into a collection. Thus, the beginnings of Highlights & Annotations: A Value-Added Reading List. The techno-weenie process for creating and maintaining the content is something this community might find interesting: 1. Print article and read it actively. 2. Convert the printed article into a PDF file -- complete with embedded OCR -- with my handy-dandy ScanSnap scanner. [1] 3. Use MyLibrary to create metadata (author, title, date published, date read, note, keywords, facet/term combinations, local and remote URLs, etc.) describing the article. [2] 4. Save the PDF to my file system. 5. Use pdttotext to extract the OCRed text from the PDF and index it along with the MyLibrary metadata using Solr. [3, 4] 6. Provide a searchable/browsable user interface to the collection through a mod_perl module. [5, 6] Software is never done, and if it were then it would be called hardware. Accordingly, I know there are some things I need to do before I can truely deem the system version 1.0. At the same time my excitment is overflowing and I thought I'd share some geekdom with my fellow hackers. Fun with PDF files and open source software. [1] ScanSnap - http://tinyurl.com/oafgwe [2] MyLibrary screen dump - http://infomotions.com/tmp/mylibrary.png [3] pdftotext - http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/ [4] Solr - http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ [5] module source code - http://infomotions.com/highlights/Highlights.pl [6] user interface - http://infomotions.com/highlights/highlights.cgi -- Eric Lease Morgan University of Notre Dame -- Eric Lease Morgan Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame (574) 631-8604