Greenbuild International Conference and Expo: Multimedia Proceedings

Four CD-ROM set, Digitell, Inc. $229. Audio-only files of each session are also available for $14 each. Order at www.netsymposium.com or by calling 800-679-3646.

Even if you attended the U.S. Green Building Council’s Greenbuild conference in Portland in November 2004, you still missed at least nine out of ten simultaneous educational sessions. Now you can catch them all, thanks to the wonders of interactive computer technology. Digitell has produced a set of three CD-ROMs containing the full audio recording of each session, presented in a multimedia format that lets you follow along with the slides (although slides are available for fewer than half of the presentations).

The audio comes through quite clearly, at least for those speaking from the podium. There are no cues as to when to switch slides, however, so the user has to figure that out from the context. Digitell provides this type of proceedings for a lot of conferences, and they seem to have the technology pretty well figured out. It worked without a hitch for us, on both Windows and Macintosh computers.

A fourth CD in the set features 36 of the posters that were presented at Greenbuild. The viewer is not as effective for reading some of these posters as it is for the multimedia presentations, but it is possible to open the PDF files directly on your computer. While not cheap, this set of proceedings is a bargain. It offers ready access to the wealth of information that was presented at Greenbuild (see

EBN

Vol. 13, No. 12 for some highlights). Now if only I had time to listen to all those sessions that I missed!

– NM