Create metadata

DEVONthink Feedback
1

I am looking at DevonThink Pro or Paperless to work with a Scansnap S1300.
I downloaded trial for DevonTHink Pro but cannot find a way to create metadata with a list of values. I can create tags but not metadata.
Ex : I would like to create metadata called “category” with a list of values associated like Home, car, health …). So when you import new document, you can pick a value for that specific metadata. Can you do that in Devon Think Pro ?

Thanks for your help ?

2

DEVONthink does not support custom attributes (e.g., such as the “fields” in Paperless).

3

Thanks. That is what I thought. Just wanted to make sure.
(You would think they would no ?)
Yves

4

By “value” do you mean a numerical ranking, or a specific category, such as “Home”. If the latter, of course you can do that in DEVONthink, either by group organization or by tagging.

5

Thanks Bill,

I mean custom attributes. Ex : Create attribute “Category” and have the possibility to choose between a few values for category like Home, Car … So you can have a few additional attributes and a list of value for each of them.

I agree that you could have a work around using groups and/or tags with all the possible values but you cannot make sure you will consistently assign the necessary tags (or assign the document to the necessary groups).

If I have customized metadata, I can make sure I assign one value to each metadata (among the selection proposed to me) and therefore I am sure I tag my documents consistently. That is what I was looking for in DEVON Think.

Regards
Yves

6

Logically, there’s no difference at all between working with a set of your custom metadata fields, and a set of groups or tags.

It’s just as easy to be inconsistent in the actual application of any such scheme. :slight_smile:

Back in the early days, I ran a computer information project to disseminate information from federally-funded research, using a database of more than a million abstracts of documents.

As the abstracts were not text-searchable, we had to depend on using searchable keywords that were associated with each abstract ID. But we found that, even when there was a glossary of such keywords, they were often inconsistently applied by different persons, and even inconsistently applied by the same individual at different times. This was a “hair pulling” problem, both at the federal agencies that produced the computer tapes and at my end, for my staff of engineers who had to translate user queries into searches by keywords.

Perhaps a future version of DEVONthink will introduce user-configurable metadata fields associated with documents. But that won’t remove the problem of inconsistent application of categories/attributes to documents. That’s the human condition. :slight_smile: