[Taxacom] Nomenclature of PDF documents

[Moretzsohn, Fabio]

Here is a question I have wanted to ask for a while, and the recent
discussions on electronic publications, suitability of PDF as long term
storage, centralized databases, etc, finally prompted me to ask:

 

Is there a best practices document regarding the naming of PDF (or any
format) documents?

 

I don't think I have seen this discussed here (I might have missed it),
but perhaps it about time we start thinking about a short "code on PDF
nomenclature," not only to name documents pertaining to biological
taxonomy, but for all fields of research (or everything, including non
research documents).

 

We hear the argument of the advantages of electronic publications and
that thousand of identical copies are saved in computers across the
world. But how do you reconcile files with potentially different names
and dates? I typically rename PDFs I download or create as a short
citation, with the name of the first author(s), date, and a short title
that makes sense to me. However, even if I saved the document with the
same name as downloaded from a journal, when I save it to my computer
the date that shows is the date it was saved; the date it was originally
created may be stored somewhere, but it is not what most people see.

 

PDFs are good for many reasons discussed on this list before, including
preserving the formatting of the original document, and the inability to
modify it. Well, sort of, even protected PDFs can be modified. But I
believe that the name of the document cannot be protected from being
changed (again, there may be some information on the original file
stored in the properties). Would it be desirable to block the file name
from being changed? 

 

If you have search software in your computer such as Google Desktop or
similar, the name of the file may not be too important if the contents
can be searched and you know some keywords. But it may be difficult to
reconcile the results of such a search in your computer with a search on
the internet. How do we know that two files that have different names
are the same, or that two versions with the same name are identical? I
am sure that there are ways to do such comparison, but it would still be
helpful if there were some rules or guidelines on the naming of such
files.

 

Just some food for thoughts.

 

Fabio

 

-------------------------------------------------
Fabio Moretzsohn, Ph.D.
Assistant Research Scientist
Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
6300 Ocean Drive, Unit 5869
Corpus Christi, TX 78412-5869
Phone: (361) 825-3230
Fax: (361) 825-2050

fabio.moretzsohn [at] tamucc.edu