American Bar Association: Houston Conference PDF Collection on CD-ROM

The American Bar Association wanted to offer their conference attendees more value, and save themselves some money in the process. Seneca helped them reach both goals.

We were provided with the electronic files for the conference brochure and more than 30 speaker presentations. From that we created a fully-searchable PDF collection on CD-ROM, which the ABA distributed to attendees before the conference began.

Inserting the CD started a cross-platform auto-run and auto-scan process (via a run-time Director file) which checked to make sure Reader was installed on the user's hard drive. If it was, the main splash screen appeared (top screen shot); if Reader wasn't found, an alternate splash appeared (second screen shot), allowing the user to install it or quit.

Starting from a friendly PDF "home page" (third screen shot), conference attendees were able to quickly link to the conference schedule and other PDFs on the CD using the purple text links.

Each seminar title in the schedule (bottom left) and in the "Index to Presentations" was in turn linked to the materials provided by the speaker, a separate PDF document on the same CD. Users could run one search throughout all the presentations, quickly finding the ones the dealt with a particular issue or topic, or presented by the same speaker. Each presentation (bottom right) was in turn linked back to its entry in the schedule and the index via Bookmarks in the PDF. URLs and E-mail addresses mentioned in the papers were linked as well.

Since all the speaker's materials were on the CD, the ABA saved thousands of dollars by not having to print them out, bind them, and distribute them as they had in the past. (Some of the presentations were over 50 pages long.) And attendees had access to the materials in every presentation, even those they didn't attend, in one handy little CD.