Day: November 16, 2011

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Please Make PDFs Go Away…

Most law firms have a history of using Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) to distribute their brochures, papers and longer written pieces. That practice matches what web usability experts have long advised: “PDF is great for distributing documents that need to be printed,” but not much more than that. The well-traveled rule is that if a document contains more than five pages of text (hint: that excludes lawyer profiles), then PDF format is worth considering.

Now, let’s throw a wrench into this. As we approach the end of 2011, many firms and their their clients are moving toward paperless offices. Clients are consuming law firm publications on a variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets, e-readers, and large multiple-monitor desktop environments. So how likely is it that we consume a PDF on printed paper? Not very.

Slaw – Revisiting PDFs for Law Firm Websites & Mobile Publishing

Finally someone has something useful to say about the future of PDFs. As someone who has to deal with found PDFs from all over the web, I can honestly say I wouldn’t miss them if they disappeared tomorrow. PDF is an excellent way to capture the artifact of the document page, but a PDF is not a web page, and PDF is not open data. PDF is a photocopy, a snapshot picture of a document. If you are interested in doing things like indexing data, repurposing data, reusing data, then a PDF is pretty useless.

 

 

 

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For All The Trekkies Out There: The Captains

http://cmdrtaco.net/2011/11/movie-review-the-captains/

The premise of The Captains is simple enough: William Shatner flies around in a jet and interviews the stars of each iteration of Star Trek to talk about their experiences in the roles that will ultimately define each of their careers.  Along the way, he has some small hijynx with fans at a Las Vegas Star Trek convention, and is generally just a goofy old guy balancing on the line between being completely full of, and fully aware of himself. You are likely not going to be surprised by my admission that I’m a bit of a trekkie.  I’ve seen all the shows and all the movies, and in many cases, a good number of times. (Ok, if I’m honest I didn’t pay that great of attention to a large number of weaker Voyager episodes)  If a new series came out tomorrow, I’d watch every episode.  If a new movie came out, I’d be there opening weekend.

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David Lankes on “Killing Librarianship”

For my librarian friends out there (you know who you are). This is the keynote from the New England Library Association Annual Conference, delivered October 2, 2011. He has a lot of interesting and provocative ideas about the future of librarianship that are well delivered in this talk. He even manages to get a shout out to law librarians. Should give you something to think about on things like dealing with the folks who come through the front door and librarians’ role is society (hint: is shouldn’t be passive). Well worth the hour.