25 years of woodworking in one summer

Written on September 8, 2009 at 4:34 pm , by Lucas Peters

Hey all,

I guess this would be my answer to Jim Heavey’s blog entry What I Did During the Summer. Because even though I didn’t get much shop time this summer, I did get to work on a very interesting woodworking project: The WOOD Back Issues Collection on DVD-ROM.

Our team took every single page of every single issue of every single year of WOOD magazine, digitized them, and put them on disc. If that sounds like a lot of work … well, that’s because it was. But please don’t tell my bosses how often I got caught up reading an interesting article from a past issue or printing off a page to tuck away in my shop reference files. This collection kind of sucks you in that way.

Since this has been my baby for many months now, I thought I’d give you the proud-parent walk-through.

The first thing you’ll see when you pop in the disc is a window similar to this. Notice the “Start_Here.pdf” icon. It’s a good place to start. (If you’re in the 1% of people who don’t have Acrobat Reader already installed, you’ll need to do that first. There are instructions included.)

Once launched, you’ll see the following. Some instructions on the left page, and stacks of the disc’s 5 years worth of issues on the right.

Click on one of the years …

… and you’ll go to a spread of covers from that year’s issues. Choose a cover …

… and you go directly to that issue. Now, from here, you can click through the arrows to page through the magazine. Or you can click on any of the articles listed on the cover to jump right to the article (The magazines’ tables of contents are also linked this way) …

… or you can choose one of the many bookmarks on the left of the window. You’ll see bookmarks for each article in the issue you’re viewing along with bookmarks to return you to the main index or to other years or even other individual issues.

Click a bookmark (or cover blurb, or TOC entry) and you’ll jump straight to the article.

Notice the little “Print this article” button. Click it to bring up the print dialog box with the page range for that article already populated.

Some pages have little yellow arrows. These indicate known corrections or important updates that have been made to the article. Roll over them with the pointer or click on them to view the update.

We’ve also included an article index for each volume. Each entry links directly to the referenced article.

Hope you enjoy. It’s certainly been fun putting it together. We’ve already had some good feedback from folks who have bought the discs to either complete their collection or downsize their bookshelf.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Lucas