Getting Started

So, if you took the time to read the description at the top of the page, you allready know that I am attempting to create a guide book for Disney Snowglobes. Why? Well, its one of the few areas of popular Disneyana that there doesn't seem to be much being documented. Not much info on the web, except for folks trying to sell globes that they have. It's also a relatively recent type of Disneyana. There were some of the cheap plastic snowglobes that were popular back in the 50's-60's-70's, but the more deluxe models that we see today at the Disney Parks and Stores really didn't start getting made until sometime in the 1990's. This made me think it would be relatively simple to create a guide. After all, at the most, there must only be a few hundred globes. Pffft! Yeah right!
A few weeks ago, I started documenting the closed ebay auctions for Disney snowglobes, when I finally got caught up to present auctions, I had over 350 pages of snowglobes, averaging 3 on a page. Over 1000 snowglobes and I was still finding new ones I hadn't seen yet every week!
But I had a few problems, if I wanted to actually get to the point where I could publish my work. I was stealing people's pics off of ebay (never intending to use them publicly) for identification purposes and the ebay research was taking up all the time I had for the project. I realized about half way through the pages I was creating that ebay should have been my last stop and I should have started with my own collection and gone through my old Disney catalogs etc.
Then I did something stupid. I was saving the document to a flash drive, got distracted and unplugged the flash drive before it was finished. The next day when I opened the document, I found I had lost about half my pictures and I couldn't retrieve them. Without the pictures for identification, it was impossible for me to match the data up with the snowglobe and since the value data I had would now be incomplete, I came to the conclusion that I was better off starting completely over. So, this past week, I spent some time organizing all my old Disney catalogs by date issued and have started scanning the pages with snowglobes. The oldest one I have is from 1995 and has a few snowglobes in it. They seem to have gotten popular quite fast, as I have the 1996 catalogs done and have done a couple from 1997, and I'm allready up to a 27 page document covering 76 globes. Oh, I almost forgot, that number also include the current snowglobes available on Disneyshopping.com. I did those before I started scanning.
Tomorrow, I will post a sample entry from my document so you can see what I'm talking about.
Rob Jones