User:Davecat

Why am I here? I found this site looking to avoid keying in all the info to catalog the stories in my collection of Analog magazine. (I had a cardfile index to much of it, made many years ago, but a computer database would be MUCH more useful. And even just typing or writing up the rest would be a big job.)

I've got a good part of the information I was looking for, but there were holes (mostly in the page numbers) & some plain errors. I've already corrected one error & filled some holes, & hope to fill in a lot of the holes, to make this more useful to others.

For what it's worth, my collection runs

January 1962-March 1976, complete except for July 1962 and October 1962.

I also have a few earlier issues (technically Astounding rather than Analog):

February 1952
February 1953
January-December 1959
January 1960
February 1960
August 1960
April 1961

The last two are in that period when the covers showed both titles, & are listed with Analog rather than Astounding in this database. -- Dave 12:32, 19 Oct 2007 (CDT)

I received the entire year of 1959 (Astounding) as a Christmas gift on Tuesday.

I should probably add that I'm not a collector in the sense that a lot of folks here appear to be. I began subscribing to Analog my freshman year of high school because I wanted to read it. In college I had the chance to read a lot of earlier issues (bound volumes in the university library!), & when the opportunity arose to buy issues from that period & earlier, cheap, I jumped at it for the sake of the contents. I mostly don't care what edition I have of SF books, except for practical things like price, weight, durability, & shelf space occupied; I don't intentionally buy things for collector-type reasons. -- Dave (davecat) 06:34, 27 Dec 2007 (CST)

Some personal projects

1. Finishing going through & entering data from my own personal Analog/Astounding collection. In some parts of this, it's merely trying to bring someone else's entry up to current standards (plus a bit of correction). Then I'll go through the whole thing again, checking, & formally verify the ones that aren't already primary-verified by someone else.

   (As of now I've done from the end back through December 1962, plus all of 1959 for variety, & some other odd ones that came up for one reason or another.) Dave (davecat) 15:29, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

2. Helping track down & enter Project Gutenberg SF, at least things I'm actually interested in myself. (I'm helping with these (proofreading & scanning) as well, which also occupies a bunch of my time.)
3. Setting up and entering issues of Mythprint, the newsletter of the Mythopoeic Society. (This includes a lot of book reviews & other discussion of fantasy.)
4. Gathering into a series those "Leonard Lockhard" stories (mostly misclassified as essays, I think) about the Spardleton patent office. The difficulty is that I believe only three of them are in issues I own; so I can't myself verify that all the items published as by Leonard Lockhard whose titles include "Profession" or "Professional" really do belong. (I foresee a lot of requests on the Verification Requests page before I'm done.)
5. Eventually I'll get around to doing my book collection. Generally it appears to me that I have much less to contribute on these. I'm not a collector in the sense that lots of folks here are, & I'd say most of what I have is in fact pretty common & already likely to be entered & verified. I could be wrong.