As one can imagine, developing an agenda book, and a cost-effective one at that, was actually quite resource intensive. Not only did I need to have all the manuscripts and supporting documents, but I also needed to produce a mockup of the book and have it professionally printed. Because these books were often 700 pages or longer, the printer would produce a sample copy for my review and approval. Then I would print shipping labels, usually for shipping an 8-lb. package overnight. The printer would develop the book and mail it from the store. I would repeat this process four times per year, costing over $7,500 per year to mock up, proof, print, and ship all the books. 

Here’s a picture of one of the AAN’s largest agenda books. 

One of our members said that she did not bring her running shoes in her carry-on luggage because she needed to make space for her agenda book. In 2008, we began to make the transition to paperless agenda books by putting all the agenda materials on a CD and shipping the CD to our committee members. This certainly decreased paper use and cost, but I still had to coordinate with our IT department the actual production of the CDs in our duplicator.

In mid-2009, we found a solution whereby we could move to a paperless guideline reviewing environment and save ourselves time and money. During my attendance at an Adobe conference in Minneapolis in late 2008, I learned about the PDF portfolio. Basically, this is an Adobe Acrobat product that enables the user to bundle a group of documents into one PDF portfolio file that retains all documents’ original properties. It is like a traveling .zip file. So now, I could create a digital portfolio of our agenda book, order the documents the way I want, create folders and so forth, and not have to print anything. And the best part is that Adobe portfolios work the exact same way on Mac and PC platforms. Because the size of these portfolios is larger than most email clients can handle, we use the Dropbox sharing option for our committee members to download the agenda. Here is a sample PDF portfolio that I have created for download to show the functionality.

There are alternative approaches to minimizing the administrative effort involved in preparing for document review. Here are three that I have thought of, none of which I have chosen to follow:

1. Create a Dropbox folder and share it with your committee. Everyone can see the document, but users could also add documents, accidentally delete something, or review a document and make their own edits. Whoops--now you have a versional control issue.
2. Send each committee member an individual email that includes all the manuscript materials. The email may be quite large, and you will find yourself telling everyone during the meeting the date and time you sent the email while they search for it. You will likely have people saying they did not get all the files.
3. Provide every committee member with a thumb drive that contains all the document. At the time the AAN made the transition to paperless agenda books, thumb drives were still somewhat expensive, and it did not make sense to keep track of thumb drives when we could create a CD.