Hello ladies and gentle men,

I don’t know how excited you ever get about reading a blog post, or writing one, but I’m about as excited to write this one as I’ve ever been for a blog post… and this isn’t even my blog! 🙂

May I introduce to you our new Atlantic Sewing Guild online library!

That’s right. I said “library”. This is a free collection of books, magazines and other digital press content I have started to aggregate on the ISSUU site that is also available as an app for Apple and Android.

What is ISSUU, you ask?

In short, it’s Pinterest where the “pins” are digital “books”!

If that doesn’t raise any addiction concerns, let me just say now this is your first and only warning about it.

On ISSUU, you can find normally paper content in digital format, as well as digital only content. There’s over 15 million documents. It’s easy to read and scan through. Most of it is high quality such that you can zoom in quite a bit and not be limited to a tablet, phone or even desktop monitor screen rendition of the content. You can collect these documents in “stacks” the way you pin on “boards” on Pinterest, to organize them. You can “follow” people who collect documents as you do, or just some stacks they have, to have them find new documents you might be interested in. You can scan documents in to post, or find a digital copy somewhere to post. You can “Like” documents, comment on them and do other things as well. But that’s all for the account owners.

What I’m here to tell you about is the collection I started for us and all the content you can start going through already.

There are 15 stacks of books and magazines on various fashion and sewing related content. Some will take a while to read, while others you might just want to skim through. And if nothing is of interest to you, just wait. More will be added. Perhaps in the near future, we could get group contributors, a feature not yet available unlike on Pinterest, I don’t believe. I just discovered this site 24 hours ago and had the idea for this library to share with you and others who learn of it. It’s gotten big acclaim from sources such as TIME magazine and the Webby awards!

You do not need an ISSUU account to read any content or access our library. However, you will if you want to collect your own “books”, or follow our library and/or others’ to see what’s newly found and/or published, organize things in your own way, and so on. A free account can be had which has all the features a general reader might care for, but it is up to you if you want to sign up.

So without further delay, could someone please hand me the duck-billed scissors and I will cut this ribbon.

(snap, snap, snap photo-op)

Ladies and gentle men… our

ASG Fashion and Sewing Online Library

(there is now a link under the Library tab at upper right of our site to jump to our online library should you need to find it again in the future, or just bookmark it on your browser)

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Who wants to be our digital librarian?

This ISSUU site and library I started is a vast and wonderful resource. Unfortunately, I neither have the time nor the knowledge of all the good resources out there to try and track down (if it were on ISSUU, like Threads magazine is not) over time aside from a bit here and there.

So does anybody in the Guild want to take on this role? I’ll give first offer to our current librarians should they want to do this. Otherwise, email the ASG address and maybe we can set up an arrangement where more than one person can contribute.

Start your own organization’s online library

This idea to pool online resources for an organization can be repeated by others, of course. Specifically thinking of some of our Guild members who are in other “guilds” or organizations like quilting, lace, crochet, knitting, crafts, etc. they might want to start a similar library, or show someone this post and get them to start their own library (or find someone who can). Same goes for any readers of this post, too, of course.

I love it when I get an idea that can be spread and be useful to many others. 🙂

Enjoy!

Minh