Improving Alias Usage

Hi, all,

My job requires I regularly present a wide variety of material. I often present a couple presentations and several videos. Sometimes content is unique to a session but often I am reusing videos and presentations from other meetings.

I am currently organizing my content by putting all files in a single appropriately named folder. Because I do not want to duplicate storage I put aliases to original files in this directory when existing content is used.

Here comes the problem: invariably at the end of a presentation someone walks up and says, "may I have all the content you presented?" As you probably know, I cannot just drag the contents of the folder to a USB stick or they will receive broken aliases and not original files. For me to get the originals, I have to "show original" for every document and then individually copy each file. This is a pain when many aliases are involved.

I am looking for a better way to do this. Can anyone help? My thoughts are:

• Is there a simple way to write an AppleScript (I am a novice!) that would copy a directory's contents to the clipboard while replacing aliases with the original files?
• Is there a command I can execute from the command line that would copy a directory or a group of files, replacing aliases with originals?
• Is there any other kind of automation I could build to do this?
• Should I be using something other than aliases that would accomplish my objective?

Thanks!

Scott