A Question for Bourbon Country Reader readers

[cowdery]

I launched "The Reader" in 1994. The most recent issue is Volume 7, Number 3, which means there have been 39 issues covering nine years. For some time now, I have been messing around with trying to develop an index, initially for my own purposes, but ideally to make available to subscribers. I'm still in the data entry stage but I wanted to ask those of you who are both BCR subscribers and StraightBourbon participants what features you would find most useful if I do make an index available. If you don't think you would find an index useful, that's a worthwhile answer too. Give me some help here. How can I make an index that will best serve you, my subscribers?

(If you would like to know more about The Bourbon Country Reader, just follow the link.)

[bluesbassdad]

I'm notorious for throwing periodicals into numerous piles, making information retrieval all but impossible. A given stack may contain issues of The Economist, Reason, Acoustic Guitar, Forbes, Malt Advocate, American Rifleman, The T.U.B.A. Journal, American Heritage, Bass Player, Imprimis, Southland Blues, Banjo Newsletter, National Review, Blues Review, and The Bourbon Country Reader. Any answer I might offer would be purely hypothetical.

However, I can offer some suggestions to bound the problem. I'm guessing that on average each of the 39 issues contained one tasting, one personality story, two to four industry news items, and one story related to the history or current production of bourbon. I can see value in a separate alphabetical index for tastings, one for industry news items, and maybe one to three more.

If a very high percentage of all items can be fit into a handful of categories, then I'd consider an index of each category plus one for miscellaneous.

In the old days that would have left the problem of what to do about future issues. In the Internet era, I'd guess that an online index would be accessible by an overwhelming majority of readers, and it would be fairly easy for you to update it with each new issue.

Another modern option would be to create a database and make a search function available.

In either case, you might want to consider granting subscribers access to a web-based facility, rather than incurring print/distribution costs.

Yours truly,

Dave Morefield

[bobbyc]

I don't know if this will help, I get one publication, They number all the pages consecutively for the whole year, even though it is 4 issues per year. The issue we had in the spring had the only Page 1 the latest one I got begins on Page 242. I think the final one each year has the index for all of them.