Magazine Research Study

[Lunarchivist]

Hey gang!

I'm looking to build value-added indexes specifically for scanned magazines. OCR is useful for keyword and exact full-text searching, but I haven't personally experienced much success with fuzzy searches. As with everything in archival processing past the initial arrangement description the value-added description/annotated indexing is incredibly time-consuming, name of the game!

I don't want to be sinking a ton of time into superfluous description that isn't useful or missing info, so I'm developing a short study to distribute to researchers in hopes of pinpointing some searching behaviors unique to the field. The study is to ultimately inform and formalize the workflow, tailoring the information to suit the needs of the researchers accessing the materials. The results would be formally recorded in a research paper and made publicly available.

My questions to you, dear readers, are:

-Would it be appropriate for me to drop the survey here? No sensitive information is to be collected, I just don't want to step on any toes.

-Are you aware of any projects related to value-added description of tech/game magazines? There isn't a ton of literature to review so any examples off the beaten path are very welcome.

Ultimately I'd like to keep this simple and the scope small in hopes of streamlining the process for us all.

Thanks!

[Areala]

I see no reason you couldn't link the survey here. As far as value-added descriptions of tech/game magazines, we do that ourselves here. Obviously not all of our magazines are indexed for contents yet, but we've a few dedicated indexers who are putting in the work for our magazine database.

If you're looking for something outside of our own site, then you'll want to have a look at @retroprime's Internet Retro Magazine Database, which is currently just a single-person operation and is already a staggering repository of information.

*huggles*
Areala

[Lunarchivist]

Great!

The form can be found here

Thanks for the IremDB link, that's exactly the type of effort I'm looking for to use in the lit review!

I'll be using the survey to inform my own practices but ultimately I'm just collecting data on how we search and sharing that with anyone who wants it or needs a citation for a grant application.

I'll be leaving the survey up until 2023 August 1 (it's a small sample group anyway) so if you wanna participate or know someone who might please feel free to share as widely as you care to and I'll post the resulting paper here for anyone that wants a dry read lol.

I'd love to discuss any of this further than the survey allows so if ya got anything to add or question let's talk!