Jeff Bosh is the Associate Librarian at Sidley & Austin, Washington, D.C.

As a speaker in front of a large audience at a legal tech conference, how do you recover your presentation when your ISP is down and what you planned as “live” presentation is, well, not going to happen? What if a new piece of legislation effecting an important client has fast-tracked its way to the State assembly floor and you want to send out a global e-mail to the delegates highlighting the benefits of the measure before the floor vote in one hour? What if your firm decides that they like X firm’s web site and want your as yet undeveloped site to have the same look, feel and functionality? A new site capture software package called MemoWeb may provide an appropriate solution for these challenges.

MemoWeb 3 pro is an application that allows users to download web sites from the Internet for later use. The product is flexible enough to download the complete site, or specific pages or files from within a site. MemoWeb will download HTML and ASP pages as well as associated images, audio files, compressed files, e-mail addresses, JAVA applets, Shockwave Flash and VRML files. Also, users can de-select some or all of these file types depending on their requirements for the download. Once a site is downloaded, it can be archived on a hard drive, in CD-ROM format, loaded on an intranet, used for in-house research and development, or just utilized offline.

For presentations, MemoWeb eliminates the need for a “live” internet connection because all the relevant presentation web pages along with associated scripts, images and applets can be downloaded in advance and are resident on the speaker’s hard drive. The presentation is quicker and more efficient without the inherent pauses associated with hypertext linking between web pages when using a live Internet connection.

MemoWeb can also be used to retrieve and download e-mail addresses from web sites. This function is useful to create libraries of e-mail contacts for global e-mail messages or e-mail directories. I recently sent every House Delegate in Virginia an e-mail voicing my support for passage of a particular education bill. The only way to accomplish this was to cut and paste every e-mail address into my e-mail application. Had I owned MemoWeb at the time, I could have easily downloaded every address into a file, in no more than a minute, by entering the “contacts” URL of the Virginia Assembly into the application. MemoWeb allows the user to “send an e-mail” to some or all of the contacts in the file created on your hard drive.

I found the product especially easy to use when capturing a complete site. Just indicate the URL, a specification of the capture location and the software is set to run. Should your target site require a username and password, MemoWeb has a data entry check box for that information. I was able to capture a complete set of the Defense Acquisition Regulations in ten minutes because the software is able to download multiple files at a time, rather than one by one. I terms of its advanced capture features, it did take me a few “trial” runs to limit my capture specifications to obtain the exact information I needed, but the simplicity of MemoWeb made the learning curve short and simple. The product will not capture database driven sites, but that alone does not diminish the value of the software.

The product retails for $39.95, and is available at https://www.goto-software.com/us/default.htm . At this price it is a welcome addition to the site capture software market.