10 years of fine woodworking

[jimmykx250]

I found a guy selling 10 years complete 1997 thru 2007 for fine woodworking mag- he was asking 100 and now is at 75. Is this worth the price? opinions?

[Vic]

I'd buy the DVDs instead. I have that many years and more.

[jimmykx250]

I'd buy the DVDs instead. I have that many years and more..

but the dvd's are pricy! This seems affordable for some decent reference

[woodcanuck]

The magazine archive DVD has every issue from 1975 to 2009. I think it was about $150...or maybe I'm dreaming...anyway, it's pretty good, the interface for searching and viewing is 'ok'...could be more user friendly, but it serves its purpose.

The issues themselves are in PDF format...so if you want an article, open the issue, pick the pages (deftly avoiding the full page ads) and bingo you've got the article. I printed a bunch, 2 pages per sheet, and brought them camping as something to read and in some cases, something to start the campfire with.

[PaulMarcel]

If the DVD has the magazine contents in PDF, I'd copy it to hard disk and let Google Desktop Search take care of it. If you have the Google Toolbar installed as well, your toolbar searches will incorporate local and Internet content together.

[woodcanuck]

If the DVD has the magazine contents in PDF, I'd copy it to hard disk and let Google Desktop Search take care of it. If you have the Google Toolbar installed as well, your toolbar searches will incorporate local and Internet content together.

Good idea...I'll probably try that out. In defense of their little search tool, they thought to let you scope your search by the following check boxes:

- Title/Sub-Title

- Abstract

- Keywords

- Full Text (Content and Ads)

and choose from:

- Author

- Department

- Range of publication year

This works really well if you know exactly what you're looking for...otherwise, you get back a lot of issues to choose from...but it does give you a thumbnail view of the articles it found. And you can mark favourites too.

ok ok, I slagged it, now I'm defending it....tomorrow I'll probably deny knowing it exists.

[PaulMarcel]

I agree with what you wrote about searching by meta data. Sometimes I'd want to search about "finish mistakes" but only want some from the past 5 years. Besides, early issues were in black n white. BLACK n WHITE?! At least they used variably-spaced fonts.

I do know, but do not know how, that Google Desktop search can incorporate the meta data of PDF files. Open a back issue and look at the meta data with Adobe Reader (probably "Properties"... I don't use AR). If you read about how to search for PDF meta data, you should be able to construct a search query that does exactly what you are saying. If I have a chance later, I'll look for that info cuz it bugs me that I can't remember it.