Views from Medina Road

I've spent a long day compiling data about this past year's awards nominations and winners -- about 1100 entries in the database over the past couple days, in addition to about 500 records for the 'major' awards already compiled over the past year -- and I'm here to appeal for leads on missing data, and to express irritation over unhelpful websites. The leader in that group would have to be the site for the Australian Aurealis Awards, which has a nice advert for the upcoming 2006 ceremony, but nowhere that I can find an actual list of the winners of the 2005 awards. Click on 'winners', and you see a bunch of icons, and no information at all. You can click on 'finalists' to see the final nominees for the '05 awards -- but only in one category per page. Click click click, and in crude tables with no cellpadding. I've tracked down winners in most categories in a print issue of Locus Magazine, but not for all categories...

The James White Award site is similarly unhelpful. It lists five stories selected as finalists -- but only the titles, not the authors. And not the winner. Was the winner announced at Worldcon? If so, I haven't found it in print, or on the web.

I've also had no luck tracking down the nominees and winners of the Lambda Literary Awards, whose website has nothing about recent years. I'm sure I saw a list of finalists a few months ago, but I can't find it on the web or in e-mail (I thought I forwarded the list to the magazine, but apparently they never printed it, and I can't find the e-mail).

Still, there are 80 some awards compiled in the Locus Index to SF Awards, and I've found '05 results for most all the others. The few that are still missing are the Ignotus, the Italia, and the Rotsler. (Not to mention several that, it's increasingly apparent, are defunct.)

My resolution for 2006 is to figure out a way of updating the awards index site incrementally, rather than just once a year. The difficulty is that the full site, with all the inter-connected links between author names and indexes and awards pages, takes many hours (aside from simply compiling the data) to validate and generate and upload; incremental updates would require short-circuiting some of those steps, posting listings of the latest nominations without links to the indexes, perhaps, or without updating all the tables and tallies. I'm working on it.