I have more useful engineering resources in bookmarks than in any other format! Over the past 9 years in the engineering field, I have meticulously curated more than 600 bookmarks for professional use. It has become an obsession, partly because of its utility and partly because I love organization and continuous improvement. 

Imagine having an extensive, searchable, personalized technical library that directs you to useful information with a simple keyword search! This isn’t a fever dream but a reality for anyone willing to put in the effort. By the time you’re finished reading this article, I hope you’re as fired up as I am about professional bookmarks!

I use Google Chrome’s bookmark manager and will discuss many of its features, though I’m sure other services have the same options. 

Before we get too much into the fine details of setting up and maintaining your technical library, we need to discuss the core principles of bookmark organization. 

• Do not keep a bookmark you don’t or won’t use.
• Do not keep a bookmark that you can easily find from memory.
• Name the bookmark using the keywords you will intuitively search for.
• If you cannot find it, you do not have it—so plan your storage thoughtfully.

Carefully setting up the bookmarks bar will go a long way toward making your technical library the ultimate resource. Bookmark the bookmark manager (chrome://bookmarks/) and delete the name so it appears as an icon. You might think of this as the “home” button for your library. Next, create a folder titled “TRIAGE.” This will be where you save articles before they are fully vetted, properly named, and entered into your folder structure. I like to empty this folder whenever I have a lapse in work or when I’m also emptying my inbox. Next up are the “REFERENCES,” “EMPLOYER,” and “LEARN” folders. The bulk of my technical library lives under “REFERENCES” in subfolders. If I’m using a specific bookmark daily, I may move it to the bookmarks bar after the last folder for easy use. 

Under the “REFERENCES” folder are the following sub-folders: analysis, broad references, design, funny, material data, office tools, search tools, time, trade magazines, and vendors. These categories have emerged to suit my needs; yours may vary substantially. A nice perk of using folders is batch-opening the entire folder by right-clicking and selecting “open all.” 

The Bookmark Manager search bar searches the bookmark name, folder name, and URL text. This is important to remember when naming your bookmarks and their folders. Some URLs were designed with keywords that greatly help searching, but others are useless. Therefore, it is your job to predict the words you will search with when you need this information (potentially) years from now. There is an art to this that is learned with repetition. If it takes you more than 30 seconds to find a bookmark you saved, take a minute to rename the bookmark or its folders to make sure you will find it next time with the words you searched this time. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes having no name for a bookmark can be useful for links you wish to put directly on the bookmarks bar. This saves space on the bar. 

Let’s look at an example. Say you want to bookmark a particular robot integrator website because you think they use novel mechanisms, and you believe it will be useful for future ideation. Think for a moment about what keywords you would search when looking for this link. Possible options include “inspiration,” “mechanisms,” “ideas,” “integrator,” “robot,” etc. You likely wouldn’t search “ABC Robot Integrator Inc. of Springfield, Missouri,” though if that information were baked into the URL, you would be successful, otherwise, this violates the rule “do not keep a bookmark that you can easily find from memory”. A viable bookmark name would be “Automation Inspiration, Robot Integrator, Mechanism.” 

It is also important to consider if you will remember that you have this information when you need it. By the time I have saved a link in my Triage folder, kept the link when emptying the folder, and considered a strategic name utilizing keywords I would use to find it, I’m likely to remember that I have it saved somewhere in my technical library. To benefit from links that I forgot or may have poorly keyworded, I use a Chrome extension that opens a random bookmark when clicked. I will use it occasionally to find “hiding” bookmarks and refresh my memory on technical topics. This is a good time to purge bookmarks you won’t use or rename those that are poorly named. 

Sometimes I only find a specific portion of a website useful, in which case I can use the copy-link-to-highlight function of Google Chrome. I save the bookmark, then edit the URL in the manager, and input the copy-link-to-highlight URL. Now, when I click on the bookmark, it will take me to the specific information that I found useful. 

Let’s talk about bookmark manager maintenance. We’ve already covered folder structure, triage emptying, renaming, and purging unused/useless links. Roughly twice a year, I will use a Chrome extension that checks all of my bookmarks for broken links and duplicates. When I find a broken link, if I think it is a useful resource, I will attempt to repair the link; otherwise, I will delete the bookmark. Sometimes the website has simply been moved, and searching for the old website using the contents of the bookmarked URL will locate the new website. If the website has disappeared, you can utilize the Internet Archive or Archive Today to attempt to find a cached version of the site. If either of these works, input the new URL into the bookmark and you’re good to go. If you cannot relocate the website, you may be out of luck. With this in mind, if I find myself bookmarking information that I think is absolutely critical to retain, I either print out the information and store it in my paper files or I archive the current website with Internet Archive. You can easily accomplish this step using their Chrome Extension.  For paper references, I use this file folder because I need something durable enough and completely enclosed, as I will take it home when working remotely.

After emptying the triage folder, running the broken link extension, and repairing or deleting broken links, it is good practice to export your bookmarks. The export file is saved as HTML and you can easily import it when needed. Since I have bookmarks for both my personal Chrome account and my work account, I name them accordingly.

Of course there are other ways to relocate technical information that don’t involve bookmarks. Here are a few I would encourage you to play around with. 

• Want to reopen a link you used yesterday? Search your browser history!
• Want to close all your tabs but keep access to them? Check out OneTab (I use this extensively)!
• Want to share a list of URLs with someone as a single link (that is not temporary)—also check out OneTab!
  • Here’s an example, which I’ve bookmarked under the title “Links for Young Engineers.”
• Find an interesting, but long, article that you’d like to read later? Save the link to Instapaper, and have the app read it to you during a walk or on the way home!
  • Here’s a good example that will resurface when I discuss landing an engineering job.
• Wish to highlight certain parts of a website that will appear when you reopen the page? Check out Weava. An excellent tool for research. 

This probably seems like a pretty extreme system of bookmark management that isn’t worth the effort! As an engineer, I will direct you to the famous words of Dr. J. Celentano, “A good engineer does not know everything. He knows how to find it out.” If you’ve spent hours or days finding a very useful online resource, the system I’ve laid out above will save you the pain of fumbling through finding it the next time. So what are you waiting for? Start building your personalized technical library, where your most valuable resource is only a keyword away. 

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