California School Library Association

Begun in October, 2005, the CSLA Newsletter is being sent to members as a PDF. Members are notified each month by an e-mail which contains a link to this page from which the PDF can be downloaded with a single click.

You can then, if you wish, print the Newsletter on your printer for just pennies a page. It will look exactly like the printed Newsletter in the past. One can argue that CSLA is shifting the cost of the Newsletter from the organization to you. That's true, but it's only a small part of the story.

Download the Oct. '08 Newsletter now! (816K)

The PDF version is so much more!

The URLs are all live
The printed Newsletter always contained many URLs, links within stories and one section called "Pathways" which was almost entirely made up of links. Many of those URLs were long and almost invited errors as you typed them in.

Now all links will be live. So, even if you chose to print a paper copy of the Newsletter, you can go back to the PDF and you're just a single click away from any website.

Pictures and now in color

The previous Newsletter contained a single accent color, red. Printing four-color pictures has always been prohibitively expensive. Now all pictures will be in color.

And if the story merits more pictures, the one picture printed will be a link to a small gallery of additional pictures. We will begin the galleries in the October issue.

E-mail links are all live also

Every e-mail link that appears in the Newsletter is now live. If you click on an e-mail address, your e-mail program will automatically launch with the address already in the "To:" field.

This will make it extremely easy to communicate with an author of an article or one of the section editors.

Entire Newsletters are now searchable

You will now be able to search any Newsletter for a person's name, a school, a keyword . . .any word at all. You will be presented with a list of the hits (just like using Google), and a single click will take you to that section of the Newsletter.

In the future, if you put all the PDF Newsletters into the same folder (say a year's worth), you will be able to search across all the back issues in the same way you search a single issue.

“Table of Contents”
entries are now links

To round things out, all the individual listings in the Table of Contents (Northern Notes, Southern Snippets, etc.), are now links.

One click and you instantly go that that section.

NOTE: To be able to do all these things, you will need to be using the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, version 7.0. It's free and can be downloaded by clicking the link above.