Review: Papers 2 (Mac OS and Windows), $79Papers for iPad and iPhone, $14.99 Mekentosj B.V. http://www.mekentosj.com/papers

Abstract

Papers 2 (Mac OS and Windows), $79 Papers for iPad and iPhone, $14.99 Mekentosj B.V. http://www.mekentosj.com/papers To access books, periodicals, articles, or archives once meant seeking out physical objects stored in buildings. Today scholars increasingly utilize digital documents, not only journal articles but also books, dissertations, and even archival materials, downloading them to computers and mobile devices for consultation anytime, anywhere. But if some argue that the strict ontology of the card catalog and the physical library is no longer appropriate for either our interdisciplinary age or our media, a competing organizational system for managing personal digital libraries has yet to emerge.1 Netherlands-based developer Mekentosj’s Papers suite of research products, released for the Mac OS, Windows, and iOS, sets out to address this problem. Taking their cues not from physical or online card catalogs, but rather from Apple’s iTunes media library management software, the desktop and mobile versions of Papers set out to simplify the process of finding, organizing, and reading documents. As with iTunes, one transfers material into Papers by dragging and dropping files or through a built-in search engine that traverses online repositories of articles such as JSTOR or Google Scholar. Executing an online search delivers results as a set of links in the viewer window. Clicking on any of these makes the article’s source website appear in the window: here a user would download an article as if working in a browser; however, upon downloading, the article is immediately archived instead of being sent to a cluttered desktop or download folder. Customized searching of online repositories in Papers is useful, yet most of the databases Mekentosj offers as part of this experience are science- and social science-oriented, betraying Papers’ origins as a tool designed by Alexander Griekspoor and Tom Groothuis when they were doctoral students at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. That Springer Science+Business Media, a company not exactly known for indexing humanities …