Written by Bob Schneider Posted on November 9, 2007

In June, I wrote a post about the recently completed 15th International XBRL Conference held in Munich. I noted that many of the plenary presentations could be enjoyed online. I specifically recommended Sebastian Muriel’s discussion of XBRL developments in Spain and Eric Cohen’s talk on the Global XBRL Competition. But I also mentioned how cumbersome it was to find, download, and listen to these talks, and that some important speeches or their accompanying slides were missing from the collection.

Initially, I was delighted to learn that last month XBRL.org had created a new archives that includes the presentations of not only the 15th conference, but the 10th through 14th gatherings as well. I opened the archive of the Munich conference anticipating that the new archives would be both more complete and user-friendly.

However, I have to say that I am disappointed. First, the archive has, so far as I can tell, only compressed PDF and PowerPoint files that contain just the slides i.e., there are no text or (much preferably) sound files of the speaker’s actual words. The page makes no mention that sound and text files for many of the plenary sessions are also available online (scroll down to the June 4, 2007, entry), and that users can combine them with the slides available here for the complete presentation.

Moreover, at least for the Munich conference, the displayed text for the links shows only the speech title. There’s no mention of the speakers or their affiliations, which for conference presentations is probably more important information than titles.

On the positive side, users can now access the presentations of past conferences at one location — literally thousands of slides for hundreds of the track sessions. Personally, I don’t care much for viewing slides without the accompanying narrative I want to hear the speaker describe and elaborate on the graphics. But I recognize that if slides are well prepared, they can often stand on their own as useful resources if you can figure out which ones you want to view.

All of these complaints may seem small, peevish, and inconsequential. Really, who trolls through archived speeches anyway — except maybe some blogger scrounging around for a topic for his next post?

But as the global implementation of XBRL comes increasingly into view, the need to educate users along all links of the business information supply chain becomes essential. Books about interactive data are still few and far between, not to mention expensive. Newspaper articles about XBRL usually are event-driven and thus narrowly focused. Journal articles are excellent resources, but many come with membership or subscription costs.

The best educational tools on interactive data are often webcasts, such as those of the XBRL GL Study Group; roundtable discussions, like those organized by the SEC; and, especially, the presentations given by XBRL experts, financial professionals, and government officials at international and more local conferences. These resources don’t cost anything; they are available from any Internet-ready computer; and they contain outstanding information.

In my opinion, users have to be able to identify and locate the presentations they want and the speeches need to be easy to download and manipulate this is key to fostering greater acceptance of XBRL. Currently, the XBRL archives do not meet those requirements.

I recognize that the task of creating the new archive may well have fallen to overworked staff who had 50 other projects to complete at the same time. But some improvements such as including the presenter’s name in the display text of a link require little additional effort. With the next international XBRL conference in Vancouver just ahead of us, I hope XBRL.org will recognize that archived presentations, including both sound and graphics, are valuable educational assets and give them the emphasis they deserve.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 9:05 pm and is filed under General, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.