As the time of my entrance into the University of Oregon PhD program approaches I have becoming increasingly busy with making arrangements relative to the upcoming move. I am not particularly excited about the process of the relocation, but am excited about the result.
One of the items on my to-do list has been to organize and catalog an electronic library consisting of thousands of books and articles, scattered in various locations on my hard drive. Previously I wrote about JabRef as the vehicle I am using for this catalog. After a couple months of use I am still very pleased with this program.
Today I want to give a shout-out to another program that has been very useful for this effort, PDFsam Basic Edition. I have been using it for merging documents where chapters are located in separate files–the IEEE Xplore Library uses this method for books. I have also found this very useful for extracting valid pages from downloaded Google books, where the lengthy Google legal banner is on the very first page, in addition to front and rear external covers, blank dust pages, publisher advertisements, etc are also scanned in, sometimes including human fingers.
Of course this program can be downloaded from the website for each of the major operating systems. The Basic Edition is free. If more features are required an upgraded version can be obtained for a fee. So far the Basic Edition has been more than sufficient for my needs.
