I push all the buttons around here.

I’ve had this lingering technology idea floating around in my head recently. I don’t think it’s at all inspired. I know someone has thought of this long before me. But I honestly can’t say I’ve ever seen it in function or practice. So anyone who wants to point out my ignorance of this technology and where it exists please feel free.

The Internet uses Meta tags to easily make information searchable. Well, I want to do this with files. I would like to assign categories or keywords to files to make them more searchable. I’m not necessarily looking to store the files in a database; a pointer to the file would work fine (storage is an option though). I’m looking to build a searchable library; my own kind of knowledge base.

I have no idea why I’m being vague. I had the idea of using something like this to help Pastor Bob keep track of all his study and sermons. He manuscripts all of them and they stay stored in a Word file (typically never to be used again after the Sunday he teaches it). I figured I could save him a lot of re-research if I gave him some way of categorizing and searching what he’s done before. Also, we collect all kinds of stories, devotionals, rants, etc. from the web. It would be great to database them and aid in his teaching prep.

The programmer in me knows I’m looking for something that deals with Metadata. That’s a fun little concept that I haven’t had to use since college. Man, I miss programming. I was always one of ‘those’ people that really enjoyed it. I was the only one.

There is no limit to how much metadata you might want to assign to a document. I guess that’s the real challenge of projects like this.

I kind of hinted to Bob I was thinking about this and his eyes widened and his face lit up. Now, I’m committed. I should have kept my mouth shut.

I’ve look up various content management systems, but all the ones I found were designed for web use. I’ve casually looked at some document management systems (which seem like a really logical name for it), however the few I found look way more complicated and advanced beyond what I really need or want. Plus, ‘document management system’ typically describes a stored, scanned version of a document. And I don’t want or need that much complexity.

It wouldn’t at all be hard to write a basic database to do this, but I know someone, somewhere has created a really great something that already does this. Again, I’m not fooled; I know this isn’t a revolutionary idea.

So please help the ignorant. What am I looking for?