Thursday, May 3, 2007

Bibliographies

I've been busily working on my thesis since my last post, but I hope to get back to posting regularly.

Here are a few online bibliographies that have been useful during my research:

The Air Force War College maintains an extensive wargaming bibliography, broken down by subject. This link is to the main page, but the politico-military gaming page and the scenario page are particularly relevant. The bibliography was compiled in 1999, so there is nothing more recent listed.

The Army War College Library put together a wargaming bibliography in 1994, which is available in pdf or html format. As far as I can tell, it remains the most current listing of Army War College Library material related to wargaming, at least that is accessible by internet.

Sharon Ghamari compiled a bibliography covering the use of wargames in the 1950's and 60's for a book on Herman Kahn. The articles that appear on this list that are not on the others mentioned above seem to be primarily of historical interest, but I haven't made my way through them all by any means.

I haven't had the chance to track down everything on all of these lists, but much of what I've already profiled here appears somewhere in these bibliographies. Good stuff. With search engines and online library catalogs the value of a good bibliography has been somewhat obscured. But for a subject like political-military gaming, with its terminological and definitional ambiguities, it can be difficult to come up with the appropriate search terms to find the most useful articles and books without being overwhelmed by irrelevant material. That, at least, has been my experience. A bibliography, even an old one, provides some names and terms and titles that can help narrow searches. That has been my experience, at least. If anyone reading this knows of any other useful bibliographies, please let me know.