Whew!
I should preface this post by saying that my “studio” (a 11 X 11 ft almost bedroom in the basement with a 1/2 bath attached) is a disaster area. You know how everyone has a junk drawer? Well, this room is the junk drawer of our house. If we have last minute cleaning to do for visitors this rooms catches it if it doesn’t have a home. I have no exposed desktop and hardly any exposed floor right now. It’s AWFUL, but I haven’t been well enough to attack it or at least to attack it on my own.
Well, one day this week I was looking for my stitch dictionaries and couldn’t find them. I made the studio that much worse trying to find them. While I was looking for them I decided to pull out all of my fiber arts books. As long as they were out I decided to finally catalog them. Yes, yes indeed, I am a geek of major proportions!
A few years ago we bought this great bundle of software from Collectorz.com. It was a bundle of the pro versions of Music Collector, Book Collector, and Movie Collector. We have our movies cataloged (well, most of them) but the music collection is huge so I told DH (the audiophile) I wouldn’t catalog them until we had a barcode scanner, but I may end up caving on that at some point. What is great about this software is that it allows you just enter the ISBNs (in the case of the books) or the UPC codes (in the case of the movies and music) and then it pulls the relevant info from sources such as Amazon, IMDB, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble etc. It even has options to pull info from Amazon UK, DE, etc. Then there are extra fields that you can populate or not such as store purchased from, purchase date, purchase price, MSRP etc. The pro editions also let you keep track of loans to other people! I *love* that feature!
One of the other features I really like is that you can export it to HTML and it auto inserts thumbnails of the covers. The only draw back is that the export isn’t dynamic so you can’t search for an author or an actor or a specific title. Though in most cases I find my browser’s search function does an okay job.
So, my fiber art library (knitting, spinning, tatting, sewing etc.) is cataloged and can be viewed at http://knitting.designedlykristi.com/library/ I know I find it interesting to see what others have chosen to put on their shelves. There are some pamphlet like things from the 60′s and 70′s that I got from Grandma Bakke about 1.5 years ago that I haven’t cataloged. But, I don’t see myself lending those out since most have loose covers and they have sentimental value. Also, since they don’t have ISBNs it isn’t so easy catalog them. I also made a fiber art book wishlist in this same format as well. What is great is should I get one of these books I just have to change the status and then it will be in the library rather than in the wishlist! How cool is that? If you have recommendations of titles you think I should add to the wishlist, I’m always open to suggestions :-)
These links now reside up top on the right in the “about” section should you care to scan them at some other point in the future.
I’ve also done a little housecleaning on the links section, adding some more blogs that I had been “test driving” and also adding a section for the PodCasts that I listen to that are fiber art related. I will be upgrading WordPress today or over the weekend and then I’m hoping to move the links onto their own page as the list is getting rather long.
As an aside, DH has been home ill since Monday. Yesterday I started showing signs of getting ill as well and had to go to the store to stock up on the meds and supplements that I can take (I have adverse reactions to most decongestants) and groceries before we got too much snow (yes, we’ve got a decent amount of snow on the ground now). But I’m a bit more on top of taking care of the bug now than he was so hopefully I won’t go down as hard or for as long as he did. Should I disappear you can assume my wishes weren’t granted and I have indeed fallen hard to the bug… But for now I mostly just have energy to do computer stuff alternating with knitting.
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