August Progress Report

As of Monday 12 August the SF Encyclopedia has 14,000 entries. Not a round enough number to seem magical, but cheering all the same.

In recent weeks we’ve been busy adding a new facility for easier access to the bibliographic Checklists in SF Encyclopedia author, editor and artist entries. These listings are often long and complex, and a lot of downward scrolling was formerly needed to reach a lengthy entry’s Checklist. Now each relevant entry has three new buttons at the top, on the same row as the buttons for Previous entry, Next entry and Incoming (what links to this entry, plus contributor and citation information). The new buttons are:

(1) Checklist – which takes you straight to the biographical information at the top of the Checklist. Just below you will find new buttons labelled Alphabetical and Chronological, which have the same effect as the other two new buttons at the head of the entry (where button labels had to be abbreviated for space reasons) ...

(2) Alpha[betical] – shows all Checklist titles in alphabetical order.

(3) Chron[ological] – shows all Checklist titles in chronological order.

If there are series subheadings in the Checklist, the alphabetical or chronological display page lists all these in a panel at upper right. Click any series name to show just that series in alphabetical or chronological order. You can switch from one order to the other at any time. For convenience we treat “About the author” (if present) as a series heading, so these listings too can be singled out. When you have zoomed in on a particular series, a Show All Titles button appears: click this to restore the full list.

The total number of entries which have Checklists and to which these new buttons have been added is more than 6400. We haven’t yet checked every one! Oddities of entry format may produce occasional strange results (for example, items in which no date can be found currently register a date of zero and rise to the top of chronological lists). Obviously, one-book author Checklists will not give excitingly different results when reformatted. The alternative views are most useful with monster listings containing many series: Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Martin H Greenberg, Andre Norton, and so on.