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I'm looking for an archive manager for Ubuntu. By 'archive' I mean a real archive, the one with paper documents inside. I tried Tellico, but it's really intended for books, not documents. Any suggestions?

P.S.: I'm sorry if the title isn't clear enough.

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Please explain your method of putting a paper document on to a computer hard disk. Are we to assume that you will scan the paper documents and then convert them into PDF. In that case you are looking for an electronic publications library manager such as Calibre. Please explain more fully what you want to achieve then we will not get voted down for inappropriate answers. –  grahammechanical Dec 1 '11 at 19:11
Thank you for your answer. No, I'm not going to scan anything. I just need a software to file documents of a paper archive (i.e. Archival number, Title, Content, Date and so on). –  The_Prat Dec 1 '11 at 20:04
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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

I believe a reference manager like jabRef would help you, jabref Install jabref is available from the repositories.

jabRef uses the Bibtex standard to store information about a wide variety of document types the Bibtex file is an ascii file that looks like this:

   author = {Jim Gettys and Phil Karlton and Scott McGregor},
   title = {The {X} Window System, Version 11},
   journal = {Software Practice and Experience},
   volume = {20},
   number = {S2},
   year = {1990},
   abstract = {A technical overview of the X11 functionality.  This is an update
of the X10 TOG paper by Scheifler \& Gettys.}

Your documents does not have to be books and they can be hard copies on a shelf or in a filing cabinet, or electronic on your computer, in the case of physical documents you just number the articles and use that as the number in the BibTex file, if they are electronic you can have a link to them in the BibTex file, they could even be on the internet.

You can read more about BibTeX here:


Take a look at the various Entry types. When you use this method to manage papers you have great flexibility as jabRef can export to many other Reference formats or export your library to a web page and so on. jabRef also has a good search facility. you can create citations for Latex and Office documents that refers to your papers.

jabRef tutorials are here:


There is a warning about this being old but from what I see it is still applicable.


This youtube video is also helpful.

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I am going to guess that you are looking for a Document Management system and here are some programs that I have found in the Ubuntu software Centre.

LetoDMS - this is the document management program. These are some other programs that you might find useful to complete your task

Office Document Reader - a launcher to convert MS Office files to PDF.

PDFMod - Remove, extract and rotate pages in PDF documents

OCRFeeder - The complete OCR suite.

PDF-Shuffler - PDF Merging, Rearranging, Splitting, Rotating and Cropping.

I give these in case you are looking for the complete solution. They are all Ubuntu programs as requested.

Edit: Oops! Right answer to the wrong question.

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Thank you. Yes, still is the right answer to the wrong question. I don't really need a database for files that I keep on my HD, but just a simple software to make an index/inventory of paper documents. –  The_Prat Dec 1 '11 at 20:35
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Alfresco could be what you are looking for. http://www.alfresco.com/ But it might be too much for what you are looking for.

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