[Sigia-l] Summary (PDF Libraries)

[Thomas.Donehower at nethodcircle.com]

Thanks to all who responded. 

ORIGINAL QUESTION
Working on a website that is basically a pdf and powerpoint repository. 
Was wondering if anyone knows of any smart examples of something similar. 
Issues I'm wrestling with include levels of navigation. Dealing with about 

200 unique PDFs that fall into categories, but still require tertiary and 
sometimes 4th level navigation. Client tends to also update docs fairly 
frequently so I'm looking for a flexible easy to maintain solution.

SUMMARY

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1. I haven't worked with this - but you might want to have a look:

http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/main.html

XMP - attach XML metadata to your pdf's at cration time.

- Diane

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Personally I've built some systems that suck the pages out and auto wrap
them into Flash elements so we could build nice drag and drop interfaces
and navigation.  We also indexed the text so the PDF's remain searchable.

It even allowed us to build an interface that actually animates the
flipping of pages like a book with the content of the book being built
from the results of the searches.

This doesn't solve your nav/IA issues (which just come down to your skills
8) )...but it does give you alot more UI flexibility.

roBman
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I was just looking at something called Drupal that's used by IA/...

drupal.org

It has a versioning and doc mgmt system along with a comprehensive system 
for setting up different kinds of sections and categories.

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Project Greenstone might be of interest as library software that can do 
html<->pdf<->doc etc.
http://www.greenstone.org/

A nice implementation at
http://bridges.lib.lehigh.edu/index.html

... suggestion: search for a 'hanging bridge' and look at the 1st 
document in the search results.

regards,
m
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Thomas Donehower
Manager, Information Architecture

EURO RSCG NETHOD CIRCLE