Magazine collecting

General
1

I’ve used the CLZ Comics app(s) over the years, and greatly appreciate the quality and features.

Recently I acquired a vintage magazine collection (late 19th century Scientific American, Cosmopolitan (when it was a literary magazine), etc, etc.) There are ~1000 issues all told.

Now, I could hijack the Comics app for this, but it’s not really tuned for it, and I don’t think these are appropriate for inclusion in the Core in any case.

Have others used the CLZ Books product for this with any success? Is there a (very) niche market for this, where the entry data would be more akin to an academic publications tracker? i.e. Series / Issue / Articles where the Series has a publisher, the Issue has an editorial staff, and the Articles have unique titles, authors, page numbers, etc…

I can’t be the only one in this situation… but I might.

Thoughts?

2

We’ve seen comic user create a separate collection and manually add everything (indeed, no need to submit to Core, we don’t include them there).

Some users use CLZ Books for this though.

It kinda depends, you might want to just try it out and see which works best for you.

(or see if anyone else here catalogs magazines of course, see what they say!)

3

I only have a handful of literary magazines, but I use CLZ Books to track them. It isn’t really set up for individual article tracking, but I add all the contributing authors to the author field and then just put the table of contents into the plot field. That way, I can at least pull a list of issues a contributor appears in.

2 Likes
4

I use the Books app for my periodicals and magazines. The “Format” dropdown list already includes “Magazines” as an option. Of course, various lists can be modified for more precise cataloging. For me, many of Book Collector’s fields go unused, but for me this app is the closest to how a library (academic, research, or public library) would catalog their materials. I make intentional use of fields like “Genre” to organize my collection (e.g. Culinary, Nature & Science, Popular Culture, Literary, various academic disciplines, etc.). I also have user defined fields that relate specifically to subscription details.

One of my challenges is how much minutiae to include. On one hand, this database becomes an outstanding index for magazine content (from compelling articles to recipes I want to remember). On the other, is it worth the investment of time to produce such an index? I waver… and my collection suffers for that.

All of this to say, I agree with your choice to use CLZ Books. It has become an excellent tool for me to catalog the magazines and journals I choose to keep.

5

Putting the TOC in the “Plot” field is a great idea. I have been laboriously using the “Contents” tab and entering only the main articles (since each one requires their own entry of title, author, etc.).