"Index of magazine articles" Topic

What would be a good way of indexing articles in a magazine collection?

With "a good way" I do mean something more than "title" and "issue number" (which by itself is quite useless). For each article, I want it to be tagged with period, rules(y/n), scenario(y/n), some remarks … such that I can easily filter articles on any of these tags.

I was considering doing it with one of the cloud services such as obvibase.com, but perhaps someone has thought about this before.

And yes, I know about the defunct magweb …

(Update): I noticed this has been discussed several times before, but apparantly without anything resulting in a good usable index. PErhaps we just should just crowd-effort this and put something together once and for all …

That's a great idea – I wonder if this might be what you are looking for?

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Tony

I've also seen this, that although not directly model soldiers or wargaming could be of interest…..

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Tony

Don't want to hijack the thread, but what about this…..

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Tony

I did an index for Don Featherstone's Wargamers Newsletter which is available on my Vintage Wargaming blog. For a while I thought about doing an index for Practical Wargamer as well but they are an awful lot of work and I haven't had the time and been distracted by other projects – transcribing George Keef's Georland blog and more recently the Interwar Tank Development blog.

If you do your index in excel then you've got lots of control and can add extra fields and sort easily

The Society of Ancients did a rather nifty index to Slingshot :

PDF link

Lots of structure – indexing by period and by gaming or background etc etc. Must have been a heck of a job!

Phil link should be working now

Phil — lovely idea, good luck! As mentioned above, I think an Excel spreadsheet is the simplest and yet most powerful approach as it can be configured and searched in so many ways by the user and is prettyy much universally usable. It can also be exported as a csv file for use in other software.

I would love to have done this myself but there simply aren't enough hours in the day…

Henry
MWBG

I was also thinking along the lines of an opendocs (e.g. Google Sheets) excel sheet – along the lines of the Wargamers NEwsletter on the Vintage Wargaming blog (thanks for correcting the link!). An excell sheet allows quick filtering on selected keywords.

As in a project like this, initial data entry is not the main concern (although it takes some time), but maintainability is. The document should still work and be accessible 10 years from now.

By making it an opendocs document, others can consult it as well, or can add entries, comments, notes, etc. Crowd-efforts such as the lostminiswiki work very well, why not something similar for magazine articles?

I made an index of White Dwarf in the early nineties, and it is still floating around somewhere. Technology of the day was not that advanced though.

Initially, I am mostly thinking about this for my own use and my own magazine collection (mostly WI 1-250, BG complete, MWBG complete, and loose issues of several other mags such as WSS, MW etc). What I really want is functionality such as: "Do I have anything like a ruleset for skirmish medieval that I can use for a quick game with the fellows next week?" Instead of "I vaguely remember reading about a game with Knights a few years ago, but where the heck is it?". Then you spend half a day browsing through the old magazines …

My plan now is to make a sample small database with entries from let's say the last 10 issues of MWBG, mixed in with some other single issues from other mags, then make it open and ask for some feedback before the project gets underway.

I also do not want to work on magazines that already have a good existing index which is publicly available. There's no need to repeat work that has already been done excellently by others.

I have about two thirds of my magazines indexed using an Access database. I use two tables – one covering Subjects, and one for Articles.

There is a one to many relationship between the tables – I allow a subject to hold many articles, but don't allow an article to belong to many subjects [doesn't happen often, and when it does I just create another Article instance.

I have fields allowing descriptions in both tables, along with a number of fields to allow categorising [eg period, nationality, subject type[battle, uniform, afv, etc] at the Suject level, and article type, publication, issue date etc in Articles].

Works well for me – its great for finding articls that you know are there somewhere…

So, I took the plunge and started on a small scale for Battlegames magazine:

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Comments welcome.

Index for Battlegames (1-34) and Miniature Wargames w Battlegames (361-389) is now complete.

Wargames Illustrated issues 1-24 so far.

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We've recently implemented author links for every article. That combined with tags should serve as a fairly effective combined index for Ancient Warfare, Medieval Warfare and WSS. Of course, it may take a while to go through every issue, but it's a start. See eg link

Update:

Wargames Illustrated 1-99 is now in the database.

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