If you study or do research today, using the Web, you may have a personal library, even a project library, in your computer. Here, you may have scanned in material from paper sources and will have materials youve brought in from the Web. The latter will be papers and articles for the most parts, but may be pages of images or even audio or video files. The audio and video dont really fit into our analog here, but pages holding them do, just as pages with images do. Given a page of images, you can rearrage them, add to captions, put in links.
When you have an htmld text, you can do multiple highlightings in different colors. You can insert notes of any ength anywhere in the text, identifying the notes by use of color, blockquoting, type size, separators or boxes, and almost anything else. You can box and color notes to appear like PostIts. More importantly, you can simply mark a notens position and bring it up in a sized separate window, providing you keep it in a notes file to accompany the paper or article. You can bring the notes up (from that file) in the same window (for all the notes) or in separate windows to allow several to be on the desktop at the same time. In short, you can work in this new den in ways you could not in any den not too many years ago.
A note on scanned in materials: Most scanners and OCR software will allow you to pull in your text materials and pipe it directly to the major word processors. Indeed, you can use those materials in your paper world den. Those word processors will, now-a-days, export the papers as htmld pages for Web publication. Those materials will be in a complex html depending on style sheets and all. These materials can be worked with and some materials you take from the Web will share these characteristics. However, it's best to save those word processor materials as, say, text with line breaks. Put this text into an html frame in eWriter and, then, massage it. Menu items will allow you to make multiple spaces into non-breaking spaces for the browser and other such things. Where the text had italics or bold or headings, you might have to fill those in. You can get sized images and such by doing an html export from the word processor and swiping the images. Your own arranging of things by moving them into tables will be a lot easier, though, if you work mostly from the text output, not the html output. Even for measuring spaces, placing italics, and those things, use the material that was scanned, even if you've proofed and fixed the word processor version.
Intra-library linking: In your own library, you can do a kind of linking that is so frustratingly withheld when youre studying out on the Web. In fact, one of XMLs purposes is to allow more complex linking. What you do here is exploit the fact that you can not only put in links, but you can insert the anchors for those links to seek on a page onto that page. To get to a place on a page out on the Web, you must use your link and a Find in the browser. Your note has to give the item to find. You have to have viewed the source to know that a phrase doesnt have a text editorns line break or a tag inside. Keep in mind, too, that pages out there may be rewritten as well as simply vanish. This is good reason to bring study material into your library. Cleaning up the pages and even simplifying the html in some cases is another reason. A third reason might be to trim it in accorance with relevancies determined by your interests.
Property considerations: A book is yours to deface in any
way, or give away, whatever. Even photocopied materials, though not
exactly yours, dont offer up much of a problem. Its
just paper in your den or library. Assuming your computer isnt
a highly protected CIA property, somebody might access your library
someday. I'd suggest you keep a pristine copy of anything with its
URL on it. Top visible line identifies it as a study copy in your
personal library. Link to the original in that identifier. Then,
make a study copy, or more than one for successive active readings.
Identify these in their top (visible) lines as well. Youll
likely want your top note there, anyway. An abstract of the item and
what you are getting from it in your study. Dont hand around
copies of materials in your personal library. In references to it,
give the URLs for the materials on the Web or quotes you would use
in a published work of your own.