I was recently thinking about the possibility of using a CMS to organize notes and extracts from articles or books for the purpose of organizing research information.

I believe this would entail establishing a server on my computer, that would be an "internal" server, accessible only by my machine. I am not sure about the possibility of such an arrangement. Any suggestions or ideas or if this has been done before would be greatly appreciated.

It appears you are thinking about unstructured data.

Personally, I find Google Desktop more than adequately powerful.