Research Resources

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For general citations and documentation purposes referencing RPG Research as a source, use this URL:  https://www.rpgresearch.com/research

The URL above has always been the URL to use to provide access to researchers for all of our website online repository research resources  as they have evolved over the decades, online since 2004.



For researchers, we recommend you start with these 2 servers

Our volunteer research archivists are still moving the thousands of content items from our older servers to our newer ones. Thank you for your patience during this massive undertaking.

First begin your search with www2, then follow up with w3.

Drill-down browsing approach (this server should be phased out by mid-to-late-2021):

https://www2.rpgresearch.com/research   (up to 2017) 

Full-text search approach: https://www2.rpgresearch.com/@@search


Then also search using either the drill-down browsing approach here:

https://w3.rpgresearch.com/research   (2017-2021)

 Full-text search: https://w3.rpgresearch.com/@@search
This server should be integrated and phased during the integration with the RPG Museum CollectionSpace server, by some time in 2022.


We're Here To Help Your Research!

We want to help you find (and share) the research you need to further your efforts.

That is why we exist.

If you can't find what you need in our online repositories, let us know, and we'll have our volunteer Archives Team members dig into our additional offline resources to help you out (these resources will eventually all be online when we finish the transition away from the current open source Plone Content Management System to our new open source CollectionSpace catalog server).

This new server will include ratings to separate "higher quality" researcher from potentially useful but less rigorously implemented content. We appreciate you input on the best approach to such a scoring system to make it easier for you to find the content you need for your project. For example, some research projects only allow the most restrictive closed, Q1 peer-reviewed journals as a source, while others allow variations of flexibility in what is considered "valid" content to include in your study.

Our volunteers are feverishly working to consolidate more than 10,000 research (and museum catalog) items into one repository here: https://rpgmuseum.org/repository(not yet ready), but our volunteers have much work to complete before that is ready for public access.

For now, the content spans 2 different servers, www2, and w3.

From those servers you can either use the drill-down browsing approach, or use the full text indexed search box in the upper right hand corner of each site, to find matches to the key words relevant to your research topic.


Extended list of resources

We have a range of research resources available to aid you in your role-playing game research efforts.

If you can't find what you need,  let our volunteers know, so we can help you personally .


Longer explanation

The archives are a bit of a mess right now from such rapid growth and because we are moving more than 10,000 content items from our several different repository servers, to consolidate into the final CollectionSpace system by 2022. This includes several thousand more donated content items to be cataloged, scanned, indexed, and entered into the museum catalog. These repositories are scattered across more than 4 different locations, and have to be migrated manually thanks to the help of our Archivists volunteer team.

We do have a  recommended process for those performing research using our free and open resources.

Start first with our oldest repository, which covers research publications up to about 2016 (and a smidgen of 2017).

https://www2.rpgresearch.com/research

The newer, but temporary staging repository server covers from 2016 to 2021 is here: https://w3.rpgresearch.com/research

Because we now have so much content, we are migrating away from our current standard Content Management Systems using Plone, to an opensource collection management system used by libraries and museums that can scale better, CollectionSpace.

When the migration is complete, all content will be in one location again, in the CollectionSpace server.


The CollectionSpace server is only accessible to volunteer staff during this transition here: http://catalog.rpgmuseum.org:8180/cspace/core/login


Besides just the growing immensity of the amount of content in our role-playing game archives, one of the major reasons for this overhaul and  our move to CollectionSpace, is so that we can try to provide more powerful storage and retrieval tools in the catalog to better enable diverse researcher's needs in degrees of content restriction requirements, scientific rigor, and other specifications.

For example the ability to toggle researched content only from Q1 peer-reviewed closed journals, versus research with less restrictive requirements, such as IJRP's peer-reviewed open journal, or other gradients of less restrictive content. 

We were trying to do achieve with tags using the Plone CMS, but it wasn't really filtering down the results as well as desired. We hope, with the input from other stakeholders, we can dial in the features that achieve this goal effectively on CollectionSpace.

We will be starting some discussion threads in the near future as Requests for Comments (RFCs), to help figure out the best way to enable this quasi "scoring" of "better" content versus interesting and possibly useful but less rigorous content.

You can join the conversations on our Role-Playing Game Social Network (RPGSN) at www.rpgsn.net Matrix server.


RFC

If you are experienced with the research or cataloging process, and you would be interested in participating in the discussion please let us know and we will put you on the discussion list. It will be a narrow and very specific discussion thread, focusing exclusively on that topic so as not to overload RFC participants with many other tangential topics, since all involved already have very full schedules. We have several professors from around the world, as well as librarians, and museum archivists on the team so far, and want to have as diverse a knowledge pool as possible to determine the best approach.

This will be an iterative process. First tested on a testing pre-production server with "real" content, that will be read-only to the general public. 

Then when worked out, moved to a clean full production server. This isn't all or nothing, we can add these fields and structure after the fact, and refine as needed, once the content is in the cspace catalog.