Sharing = ? caring
As I have already highlighted the issue of sharing of pdf files is a big concern specially on a public website. We can land up quickly in trouble in this issue. Infact my name and modifications on wikidot are already visible in google :-) .
To circumvent this problem the following solutions can be advised:
- Not to post pdf at all - In many situations article PDFs are downloadable free of charge and just giving the URL to the pdf will be suffecient. Infact with google we can just give the title and leave the rest to the search engine itself.
- To email pdfs to the required person - the problem remains that the pdfs of concern will not remain in use for other people.
- To use a file sharing site like ifile.it - relatively anonymous and simple to use - however too much use will definately bring about heat. My recommendation would be to use this solution with an encrypted archival system - basically a zipped pdf with password. The biggest advantage is files size and number are not a limitation anymore.
- To use a social bibliographic software like mendeley (see the button below) , zotero etc. The former i was testing out and has the interesting feature that it allows sharing PDFs. But the granularity of the content sharing is not there.
- To keep using the yahoo group to store the pdf with access restricted to members
- This one is a idea i thought out recently. Open a gmail account in name of isocentre and use it to store the pdfs. All registered and verified members can subsequently be emailed a discreet id and password for use at this id. The large storage will mean that 1000s of pdfs can be stored with little problem and till date i have seen gmail storage size keeps increasing. To further streamline the process we can use a system of labels and filters to automatically email the pdfs received to all members in the site without lifting a finger or pressing a button.
Please do tell what you all think is a good solution for the site.