Digital file organization
December 3, 2009
I’ve been organizing the documents on my hard drive by academic year for the past ten years or so. In my documents folder, I have folders called 0102 (for the 2001-2002 academic year), 0203, etc. This is handy because stray files that didn’t warrant a sub-folder are relatively easy to find. But there are two problems with this system: First, it was never clear where to put files from the summer; and second, as I’ve digitized more and more of my paper files, I’ve often wanted all documents of a kind in one place. The first issue is easily remedied–by rearranging the files by calendar year, but the second is a bit tougher. I suppose that ideally, I’d use tags on all the documents so that they’d be viewable by more than one characteristic/access point. That would have to be automated somehow…
December 3, 2009 at 3:24 am
I have mine organized by specific semester (or in the case of my thesis, project). Of course the only problem is when I forget in what semester I did a given project. I also tend to keep the course number in the file name which works as long as I remember the course number. (This gets tricky now that I have two courses that had the number 706, but I think I can tell what’s on Renaissance notation and what’s on computers.)