One of the traps that is very easy to fall into as a homeschooling mother is an overload of pdf files that you can’t find. You know the problem, I have a wonderful worksheet about … insert Johnny or Joanne’s favourite subject here… now, where on my hard drive did I put it. I’m pretty good at creating folders with descriptive names but after you end up with several hundred pdf’s it doesn’t really help very much. When you have files with useful names like document.pdf it’s even more difficult to find that exact file that you know will work beautifully for the particular study you are doing right now.<\/p>\n

Enter Calibre E-book Management<\/a> software. My brother originally introduced me to Calibre for epub’s\u00a0 but I figured that if it’s good for organising epub’s it would be at least as good at organising my quickly growing collection of pdf’s as well. Actually, from my point of view it’s much, much better at organising my pdf’s because I generally don’t have trouble finding the epub’s I want, I just pick one at random from my Kobo. So, how is Calibre helping me organise my pdf collection? Well, at the moment I’m going through and adding all the pesky little files that are lurking all over my various hard drives. I have the Calibre library set up on the hard drive that is connected to the wireless network and every file I add gets put on the hard drive where it is easy to find. The advantages don’t end there though. Calibre lets you change the title that it displays so that you actually know what the file contains, it also lets you add author information. It’s really great strength though is tags. You can assign any tag you like to any file so when you are looking for that great geography resource you can narrow the number of files you need to check through by selecting only files tagged geography. You can also add as many tags as you like to a particular file so the geography worksheet about Bolivia? Dead simple! The other thing I like to do is to put the website name in the publisher field so I have a general idea of where to go for similar resources.<\/p>\n

Under the settings of Calibre it is possible to specify a folder for auto-adding files. If you set this to be the folder you always download pdf’s to then your files will be automatically added to Calibre. Beware though, these files will also be automatically deleted from the auto-add folder so if you want to keep backups organised differently copy files to this directory don’t save them there. At the moment I am moving each set of files to this directory so that I am only working with a small (ish) number of files at a time and I know that they all have something in common, usually either a topic or an author. Calibre also has a setting that marks all new files for the session. This is very useful if you are having Calibre auto-add files as you can see at a glance which files you have to check and probably tag.<\/p>\n

I would suggest that as you download each file you add it to calibre and make sure that you add the publisher information because not all files will have anything to identify the source and it’s just easier to add one file than a hundred.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the traps that is very easy to fall into as a homeschooling mother is an overload of pdf files that you can’t find. You know the problem, I have a wonderful worksheet about … insert Johnny or Joanne’s…
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