That’s text. Images are handled similarly but with one caveat: I actually do tag ‘em with IPTC metadata (usually just keywords) whenever possible. I wish there was an easy way to do that with plaintext. There are some standards for it (like TEI-C) but the tool stacks are aimed at people with MLS degrees…

I agree that this makes a lot of sense (and it’s the way I store my own meager collections), but I’ve always wanted more.

I find saving webpages especially frustrating and was wondering how you went about it. Saving pages from the browser seems inefficient, especially when you want to save more than one page from a site, and you end up with rewritten links to a folder you now have to keep static. Do you bother with scripts or Teleport-like programs for your web archiving on a whim? Do you include any metadata of your own in terms of the original URL/WHOIS data, or the links by which you came to find the now archived page?

That concept of adding personal metadata to a collection is what always got me going and was the root of the question I didn’t fully ask in the last comment. I continue to dump media into categories like you do, but it kills me that there’s such a lack of context and the original file name is often useless in an organizational sense, but incredibly important with respect to proper [read: OCD?] archiving.

I imagine some kind of card catalog would be impossible on the scale at which you acquire files, but is this something you daydream about too? For instance, what do you do when you’re pulling down photos and they’re named “1.jpg” “2.jpg” etc. Likely you’ve encountered tons of those, so do you have a rule for renaming them? Do you have little ID files that go along with them that list the source, original filename, creator, breadcrumbs of any kind?

This is the magical, impossibly complicated system I was hoping to hear you describe….

Do you aspire for that level of organization? Have you worked on a partial solution at any time? Do you have something like this in place, but consider it a trade secret?