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

December 1961-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
January 1961
February 1961
March 1961
April 1961
May 1961
August 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.