BILLD My own approach as a heavy user of DT Pro is to use topical databases. I'm currently managing a hundred thousand or so documents among several topical databases. My main database, which focusses primarily on my interest in environmental science, technology and regulatory and policy issues comprises about 21,000 documents and about 24 million total words. It runs smartly (in more senses than one) on my MacBook Pro with 2 GB RAM. I'm in process of building an associated database covering chemical analytical methodologies (both US and EU), statistical and other procedures and issues related to the evaluation of environmental data, sampling methodologies, etc. This may likely grow larger than my main database. Splitting out the very specific methodological material not only keeps my main database speedier, but keeps the AI features and searches in my main database from being diluted by the specifics in the methodologies database. That's important. As to organizational structure, personally I've never considered my organization hierarchical. I approach organization as putting 'clusters' of related content into groups, as well as 'clustering' related groups. Many of my documents are replicated into two or more groups. Likewise, I often replicate a group into two or more 'clusters' of groups. I will use smart groups to replicate documents for a particular purpose, or replicate results of a search into a new group of related items. I rarely tag individual documents, as I rely on the combination of grouping, searches and the 'See Also' AI feature to identify material in the process of a research project. DT Pro provides other tricks such as Option-click on a term to see other documents that use that term, Command-/ to initiate a search on a text string, and 'See Selected Text' to provide a list of potentially related documents. In the process of a project I'll often create rich text notes linking to documents of special interest, or 'mark' them temporarily (I usually clear such marks later) using label or state marking. Disclosure; I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies. (12/5/2006, Version: 1.3b)
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