Acrobat for AEC Knowledge Management - Adobe Acrobat and PDF for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction - page 208

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Acrobat for AEC Knowledge Management
One of the major challenges of AEC project management is the tremendous volume of knowledge that has
been created in the last 50 years. The time invested in searching for information is a significant productivity
drain. PDF and Acrobat offer a way to manage knowledge as never before.
During the 1960s, the United States, under the direction of Dr. W. von Braun, put a man on the moon
within a 9-year period using only slide rules, drawing boards, and typewriters. In the 1970s the space
program was drastically curtailed, with much of the knowledge scattered among bunkers, garages,
government warehouses, microfilm, and within the brains of retirees.
An initiative to return to manned deep-space flight and eventually a manned trip to Mars has made the
information valuable again. The New Economy Institute (NEI) is working with the NASA Marshall Space
Flight Center under the Congressionally funded Workforce Aging Management Program (WAMP). As a
significant percentage of the NASA scientist and engineer populations near retirement, their knowledge
needs to be captured, along with other scattered resources.
In this Chapter
In this chapter you see how to use Acrobat's catalog feature to index and create a database of the text in a
document collection. You learn how to:
x Collect and store files for ease of indexing
x Build and configure a catalog
x Attach an existing index file to a document
x Search a single document
x Search an index and examine returns using modified and customized search parameters.
The Marshall Star Digital Collection
The Marshall Star [1] is NASA's oldest continuing publication, and is used as a case study throughout this
chapter, as well as the chapter's project. The publication, started in fall of 1960, has over 2200 issues and
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