Have you taken advantage of the latest improvement available in BarBooks™?  If you’re like me, and you’ve never cared for the HTML approach to OSB Legal Publications, then you’ll love this upgrade.

Previously, BarBooks™ were only available online.  To access a legal publication, Oregon State Bar members had to login to the OSB site, then explore BarBooks™.  Publications could only be viewed a section at a time, which was incredibly tedious.  (Each chapter is made up of multiple sections – some are a few pages long, but most are only a paragraph or two.  This made for a lot of back and forth HTML navigation to read an entire chapter.)

While this navigation still exists, there is a newer, far superior approach that I highly recommend.  You may wish to use it for every book you regularly access.

Login to the bar Web site as before, choose Explore BarBooks™, select a book of interest.  Click Download this Book, then Save.

Browse to the desired location for saving the book.  Before you hit “Save” again, give the book a proper name.  (All book names are abbreviated.  Unless you rename it now, you may not recognize it later by the truncated version.)

Voila!  You have now created a PDF copy of the entire publication on your local hard drive.  You’ll never need to login again to access the book (unless it is updated.)  Better yet, by using Dropbox or a similar file sharing service, you can make the PDF available to all computers and devices where Dropbox is installed.

Your downloaded PDF will open automatically in “Bookmarks” view.  All bookmarks are hyperlinked.  Just click on the pertinent bookmark to go to the Table of Contents or chapter.  To do a basic search of the PDF in Acrobat, enter <ctrl> F and type your search terms in the pop-up box.

To do an advanced search, enter <ctrl><shift> F.

An advanced search allows you to better control search results by selecting Whole words only, Case-Sensitive, Include Bookmarks, or Include Comments. You may also search multiple PDFs.  How would this be helpful?  Imagine that you have downloaded several OSB legal publications and now you want to search across all the books you have saved as PDFs.  Enter <ctrl> <shift> F, select “All PDF Documents in.”  Enter the word or phrase you want to search for, and click Search.  (This works for PDFs you’ve saved in Dropbox too – just click on the down arrow next to “My Documents” and select “Browse for location…,” then navigate to where your Dropbox folder sits on your hard drive.)

Talk about convenience and flexibility!  I love the download to PDF option.  The ability to search several books simultaneously is a powerful, time-saving tool.  If you are an Acrobat X user, you can even save your search results for future use.  Happy researching!

Copyright 2011 Beverly Michaelis