You might also add a summary in spotlight comments or in a meta-document to which you have given the same tag (e.g., the document’s BibTeX citation key). I.e., tagging is an additional tool you can use to help you elaborate and distill knowledge. By extracting the major concepts from a paper, you can improve your understanding of the paper in the future you might not even need to retrieve the paper at all, you might be able to simply refer to your own memory. For example, a paper on the test-effect might talk about Mary Pyc’s “strategy shift hypothesis”, and you might tag the paper with that. As you read documents, you could remain attentive to the most potent concepts they convey, those that stretch your understanding. ‘Elaborative encoding’ is a cognitive science term for reasoning about information and (mentally) representing information in relation to previously stored information, such that you understand it better and can retrieve and use it more easily in the future. Systematic and mindful tagging can dispose you to encode information more elaborately. But there are other significant potential benefits beyond that.
The standard reason proffered for tagging is that it facilitates finding files later. Keep in mind, however, that only a few iOS apps preserve OpenMeta. If your tags and files are instead stuck in an application like Mendeley or EverNote, you can’t re-use your tags throughout your Mac. OpenMeta’s tagging feature is well-documented, so you’re not trapped by third parties. Any of these tag-based searches will weed out duplicates and files that weren’t worth tagging as such. It even allows you to navigate your tags. Or you could use an OpenMeta application such as Ironic Software’s Yep which facilitates searching by tag. Later, you can search for all files on the test-effect by using a spotlight query such as: “name.pdf tag:test-effect”. A better way might be to tag the papers up-front with “test-effect”. To find them later, you might resort to Spotlight (OS X’s search tool), but that is likely to yield false-positives unless your query is well-crafted. You might store some of them in a reference manager such as Mendeley and the others elsewhere. (The test-effect is a property of human memory).
Suppose you download a bunch of PDF papers on the “test-effect”. The OpenMeta framework allows you to tag files and to search for files by tag.
But, if you’re using a Mac and are up for it, there is also OpenMeta tagging.
You can use aliases or symbolic links for this (on Windows, they are known as “shortcuts”). Sometimes you want files to be in more than one folder at the same time. Then I present and respond to criticisms of OpenMeta. But first, I describe some of the benefits of tagging. The main point of this blog post is that if you’re going to use the OpenMeta tagging framework for OS X, you should consider purchasing more than one OpenMeta app.