Cleaning Up The Magazine Database In 2019

[Phillyman]

Well its a new year and I need to tidy up the Magazine Database. I took some time to think about how I want to handle this and what makes sense going forward. Today I pulled all the Magazine Categories for the USA section into Google Sheets. Once the USA section is cleaned up I will move onto the International sections.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17fpz8RPIXCJC-sqSVJu7mfkaocb6mpz_x9HkChCalbI/edit?usp=sharing

Having this data in an online spreadsheet will be much easier for me to work with and collaborate with you guys on. Once I get the USA spreadsheet completed, I should be able to not only flip forward the dates for publications like Nintendo Power and GamePro, but I should have a much better understanding of the three main areas that each magazine falls into.....

• Static Publications - These are your magazines like Sega Visions, Next Generation, Nintendo Fun Club, etc. These magazines were published a long time ago, are defunct and once we set their issues to "Allowed" and "Defunct".....we really should't need to go back and adjust them in the future. This will probably be a very long list, that will grow over time.
• Jumping Publication - These are your magazines like Nintendo Power, Electronic Gaming Monthly, GamePro, etc. These magazines may have started out way in the past, but they existed into various spots in our cutoff dates. So these magazines need to be evaluated each year to push them forward. This list should be very short, that should shrink over time.
• Denied Publications - These are your magazines like DieHard Gamefan and Game Informer, where we have been asked NOT to digitally preserve them by the publisher. This category will also contain magazines like PureNintendo, @Gamer, Walmart GameCenter, etc.....where the magazines started relatively recently and are not close to the 10/15 year cutoff for defunct/ongoing magazines. This list also should be fairly short and items from this list should fall down to the other two lists depending on how long they lasted.

I will also be comparing the Magazine Database categories to the Publications Database to make sure that everything that exists in one, exists in the other. Finally I will be running a dump on the USA section to see what issues are missing field data like the year released and such. If anyone notices anywhere that needs attention in the USA section for right now, let me know. I know when I went into the COMPUTE section I noticed that all the Month/Year data is missing, even though we should know it by now. If you know of any data that is missing, or any data that needs to be mass changed, let me know.

Once I get done the USA section, I may open up the UK and Japan spreadsheets to be modified by anyone who wants to lend a hand so that we can get this done in a few days, rather than a few weeks or months

 

 

 

[E-Day]

To touch on this, while going through and creating index tables in the Publication Database for the US magazines, I came across some I could not create because they do not exist in the Magazine Database.

Need Magazine Database Entries

Atari Connection
Beckett Cheat Codes
Tip & Tricks Video Game Codebook

These will be hard to do as we don't have solid info on the number of issues or when they came out and how frequently. Atari Connection has an index table listing when issues came out, so that should be straight forward.

To keep things together, below is a list of publication database pages that need index tables (or have incomplete ones)

Need Index Tables in Publication Database

Beckett Cheat Codes
Computer Games (1983) - incomplete table
Dangerous Waters
Game Player's PC Strategy Guide - incomplete table
Game Players PC Entertainment - incomplete table
Tip & Tricks Video Game Codebook