• 03 Oct, 2025*

Back in July, I made a callout asking for your help on cataloguing a vast amount of architectural sustainability resources I had discovered over the summer, ranging from material research and databases, manufacturers, publications, and more. I had much more feedback than I expected! I figured I would share with you all some of the advice I received.

As a refresher, I needed my database to hit 3 markers:

• To be easy to navigate
• To be easily accessible
• To be easy to add onto Sylvia:

Sylvia has been collecting information for years by using a bookmarking site called Pinboard which she actually does not recommend due to the inactive developer. Here’s how services like Pinboard work:

• You add a bookmarklet to your browser’s favourites bar
• To save something, you click the bookmarklet
• A window pops up where you can then add a note and tag the resource
• The resource is now saved and searchable and filterable by the tag The only downfall with online cataloguing like this is link rot, especially for older websites. Some services also provide archiving services though.

She also mentioned are.na, which allows you to save “blocks” of information, whether it be text, photos, whatever. I did consider it, however I didn’t want to load half of my database onto the website only to run out of blocks and have to either buy a membership or move a ton of info elsewhere.

Xavier:

Xavier brought up the idea of personal wikis, inspired from this post that he had seen. In essence, a personal wiki would operate somewhat like the digital gardens that have been a very big discussion in the small internet lately.

Expanding off of making pages just on your own site, he also showed me this platform called Listography, which is exactly how it sounds. It’s a platform for creating lists on anything and everything, which I did find really charming for my more personal lists, like music or media of non-academic kinds.

I already have something of a digital garden on my blog, which I... mostly keep up with. While I love lists, documenting little things like that in general, his recommendations were much better suited to less intricately sorted items, as there’s not very much cross-tagging you can do on web pages. I think I may pick up Listography for my own personal use though!

Tozka:

Tozka described to me their Calibre system, which is a system mainly used for e-books. It has all the components that you could possibly want in a system: tagging, searching within saved texts, adding your own notes to info chunks. You can run it either as locally stored or as a server so that you can access it anywhere.

They also mentioned Joplin, which is a notetaking app for their initial researching phases. It’s a software that seems to function similarly to things like Notion.

Spoiler: I have not actually tried these systems, but I will definitely research them more!

Parker:

Parker is a mathematics professor, meaning that over the years, he has gotten his organization system going like a well oiled machine. Rather than give me direct resources/programs to do my sorting on, he gave me advice on how to go about my sorting.

He put prioritization on a couple of key points:

• Always have backups
• Two resources for this that he gave me were TaoBackup, which is a real relic if I’ve ever seen one haha, and this post from Soren Bjornstad on backups.
• Organize progressively and organically. As he says, make a structure, build on it, and revise as needed. He also brought the idea up of static websites, however I know beyond nothing about coding in any way so that would be a lot for me to learn for a database, but could perhaps work for others.

His sorting system is simple yet effective: Very carefully filed digital folders. Should he need anything more complicated than what can be contained in a plain document, he does on spreadsheets. He said the statement that I think was the most illuminating thing out of everything I had read:

Don’t get sucked into crazy tools. You probably don’t need them.

So, what system did I end up using?

In a way, none of them. I would say what I ended up with most closely resembles Parker’s guidance.

I currently have all of my information in an Excel Spreadsheet, which is laughably simple compared to all my options, but honestly serves me best right now. While Excel itself seems simple, the chart is anything but.

It currently is separated into two pages in one file, one for resources and one for materials. The resources are much broader, having anything from magazines to research to school thesis databases, while the materials are all specific companies and manufacturers of funky materials.

Right now, I have a grand total of 7 columns that are all drop down menus so that I can sort and filter out my chart based on any of the criteria. Here are my 7 columns for resources:

• Name

• Type of resource (material/research database, publication etc.)

• Is it academic? (y/n)

• Category (bio-based, healthy, sustainable, ethical)

• Material (cork, recycled plastic, etc)

• The website link

• And finally, notes. And here are my 8 columns for materials:

• Name

• Where the company is based in

• Category (Bio-based, recycled, sustainable)

• Material (Straw, textile, concrete, etc)

• Interior or exterior? Or both?

• Application (Interior/exterior cladding, countertops, etc.)

• Website link

• Aaand, notes. I’ve found that this has worked exceptionally well for me so far! Like so many things in life, I’ve discovered that simplicity really is key.

Thank you so much to everyone who reached out offering their thoughts and advice to me, and if anyone else has more ideas or simply loves cataloguing and sorting like I do, feel free to reach out!

#thoughts