Internet Speculative Fiction Database

The ISFDB database indexes speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate history) authors, novels, short fiction, essays, publishers, awards, and magazines in print, electronic, and audio formats. It supports author pseudonyms, series, and cover art plus interior illustration credits, which are combined into integrated author, artist, and publisher bibliographies with brief biographical data. An ongoing effort is verification of publication contents and secondary bibliographic sources against the database, with the goals being data accuracy and to improve the coverage of speculative fiction to 100 percent. == History ==

Several speculative fiction author bibliographies were posted to the USENET newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written from 1984 to 1994 by Jerry Boyajian, Gregory J. E. Rawlins and John Wenn. A more or less standard bibliographic format was developed for these postings. In February 2003, it began to be hosted by The Cushing Library Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection and Institute for Scientific Computation at Texas A&M University. The ISFDB moved to a commercial hosting service in 2008. On 27 February 2005, the database and the underlying code became available under Creative Commons licensing. ISFDB was originally edited by a limited number of people, principally Al von Ruff and Ahasuerus. Editing was opened in 2006 to the general public on an open content basis, with changed content being approved by one of a limited number of moderators in an attempt to protect the accuracy of the database. ==Reception==

In 1998, Cory Doctorow wrote in Science Fiction Age that "[T]he best all-round guide to things science-fictional remains the Internet Speculative Fiction Database". On Tor.com, James Davis Nicoll described the site as "the single best [SFF] bibliographical resource there is". Gabriel McKee, author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction, described the site as an "indispensable [source] of information in putting this project together", and the site was described as "invaluable" by Andrew Milner and J. R. Burgmann in their book, Science Fiction and Climate Change. The Chicon 8 committee gave a special committee award to ISFDB during their opening ceremonies on 1 September 2022. As a real-world example of a non-trivial database, the schema and MySQL files from ISFDB have been used in a number of tutorials. Schema and data from the site were used throughout Chapter 9 of the book Rails for Java Developers. It was also used in a series of tutorials by Lucid Imagination on Solr, an enterprise search platform. , Quantcast estimates that ISFDB is visited by over 67,400 people monthly. The database, , contains 2,380,108 unique story titles from 283,651 authors. == References ==