American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons: Journal Archives on CD-ROM

To increase the value of AAOS membership to the association's 20,000 members, the managing editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons wanted to distribute a CD-ROM containing all of the Journal's back issues. Not only did he need the document collection to be searchable (by editorial content, author, year, etc.) but he also needed the CD-ROM to be very easy to use and navigate, as many surgeons are all thumbs when it comes to computers (he said it, not us!).

This hybrid CD project incorporated the same "autorun and autodetect" programming as described in the ABA CD project, ensuring that the users had the proper version of Reader installed.

Seneca created a persistent splash/entry screen (top screen shot) so the doctors wouldn't get "lost" if they closed all the PDF documents. We made a home page with three big buttons (second screen) and wrote a 12-page Help file in PDF format, making sure there was a link to the Help section in every article from the Journal.

The artwork and PDF pages we created for the CD were purposedly based on the "look and feel" of the printed Journal to further increase the users' comfort level.

As an aid to navigation, we created a custom Table of Contents that linked to every article in the collection, with its own "how to use this Table of Contents" text and artwork (third screen).

For the articles themselves (bottom), we created section links to allow the doctors to easily navigate within the articles, and included a separate bookmark section with CD navigation links and quick access to the Search function.

The project was so successful that JAAOS has commissioned annual updates for the past four years, with no changes needed to the artwork or navigation.