The more you use Gemini Notebook, the more notebooks you accumulate. Some are active research projects. Some were experiments that went nowhere. Some are half-finished drafts. Some have no sources at all — just a name you typed and never came back to.
When every notebook looks the same in your library, finding the ones that matter gets harder over time. Library Hygiene in Notebook OS helps you surface the signal and reduce the noise.
What the Hygiene Filter Does
The Hygiene Filter is a view filter in your Notebook OS library. When you enable it, Notebook OS highlights notebooks that match certain low-quality signals:
- No sources — notebook was created but never populated
- No title — using the default "Untitled notebook" name
- No tags — not categorized in any way
- Single source — may be incomplete or an accidental duplicate
- No recent activity — not opened or modified in a long time
These notebooks are not necessarily bad — you may have a good reason to keep any of them. But they are candidates for review. The Hygiene Filter brings them to the top so you can make a deliberate decision about each one.
The Free Plan Has Basic Hygiene
On the free plan, the Hygiene Filter flags notebooks by the most important signals — no sources, no title, and no activity. This is enough for a basic library review.
Pro adds more granular hygiene signals that surface notebooks with overlapping or redundant sources — a different kind of organizational problem.
A Monthly Hygiene Routine
The most effective way to use Library Hygiene is as a monthly reset:
- Enable the Hygiene Filter to surface low-quality notebooks
- For each flagged notebook, decide: delete, populate with sources, rename, or keep as-is with a tag explaining why
- Add a "reviewed" tag to notebooks you have deliberately decided to keep even without sources (e.g., placeholders for future work)
- Disable the filter and enjoy the cleaner view
Ten minutes once a month keeps most libraries manageable. The longer you wait, the more decisions pile up.
Hygiene Filter + Library Map
The Hygiene Filter and Library Map work well together. Use the Hygiene Filter to identify candidates for deletion or consolidation, then use Library Map to see whether those notebooks overlap with other notebooks in your library. If two notebooks cover the same topic and one of them is a hygiene candidate, that is a strong signal to consolidate.