The Origin of USMS Digital Archives
The purpose of this page is describe the inter-relationship of USMS digital archives and systems which are proprietary to Carl House. This seems desireable as Carl is preparing to administer a contract for USMS which will involve (a) exporting data from his APL formats to an SQL database and (b) converting some maintenance procedures so that they will work with the new SQL format.
Background on Carl House
Carl has derived great benefit from swimming inasmuch as it rescued him from severe back pain.
In order to maintain his commitment to swimming for its health benefits,
he began to broaden his involvement and developed a major interest in swimming subjects,
always working as a volunteer. While he would not call himself a professional programmer,
his skills in manipulating data in computers have always been brought to bear on
whatever interests him. Needless to say, they were brought to bear on swimming. More background follows.
Carl is a fellow who learned in high school that he had a knack for mathematics but who consistently made humanistic choices for his career path. He began preaching in high school and worked his way thru college as a preacher majoring in psychology as a pre-theology subject. In his junior year of college, he decided preaching would not be his career choice. He took a job on graduation in marketing with Procter & Gamble (brand management). Five years later he left, spent a year in an ad agency, and then enrolled in Harvard Business School. His gift for math was borne out in computer modelling and related classes, but his focus remained on humanistic matters. On graduation with an MBA, he began working in community development (The Rouse Company) and that has been his career focus since, though computers have been very important in his work ever since Harvard. Jim Rouse said Carl's profession was "development economist", and he has used that term ever since, though there is very little formal education in economics in his background. His last employment was as Director of Research and Analysis for the Rouse Company. In that capacity the 45 people in the computer systems department reported to him, though he wouldn't want to take any credit away from Jim Getschman as to how the department was really run. Carl programmed in Basic at Harvard, began programming in APL a year after graduation, and has had little interest in other languages since as APL enables him to do just about everything needed and with great efficiency. In developing APL systems to support his consultancies in community development and economic development, he has accumulated an extensive library of APL functions which are used in all aspects of his work. The total number of APL functions in this library is now 8841. Starting in 1993 Carl began developing what has since become the digital archives of USMS using this library of APL functions. This work for USMS has required that 193 functions be written specifically for USMS work. The total number of functions required in the maintenance of the digital archives of USMS is 1073 (880 functions have been drawn from Carl's utilities). This does not include functions used for backup and purposes which don't related to the maintenance of the SwimGold database and/or webpages.
Background on USMS
USMS is the national governing body (NGB) for a sport called "Masters Swimming" that
began with its split from the AAU in 1972. It is now one of the five NGB's
which together are United States Aquatic Sports. USMS has 40,000 members.
Most of its operations have historically been done by volunteers, though there
is a strong movement in USMS now to move more towards professional management.
While all officers and Board members are volunteers, USMS has 3 paid staff people
(administrator of the national office, controller, and webmaster).
As might be expected, the volunteer labor pool did not accumulate
historical data in any sort of an integrated database.
Carl, as a result of his friendship with Dorothy Donnelly and June Krauser,
began to accumulate information in APL databases.
Other people, especially Meegan Wilson, began adding to these databases,
and many dozens of volunteers also helped with proofreading and filling in gaps in data.
One of the most difficult aspects of this work was that there was no key field
for the evolving database. So, a permanent SwimmerID" was created so that all the
data on individual people could be tied together despite inconsistency in names used
by swimmers (and legal changes as from marriage). The value of the SwimmerID is
evident in the approximately 300,000 links among the webpages.
What's Been Important in the Creation of Our Archives
The most important values at work in the design of USMS digital archives are these:
- Accuracy: Barbara Dunbar's research is a cornerstone for our archives.
- Timeliness: It is our practice to make all updates the same day we get them, whether it be simply a birthday or an entire new season of Top Ten. This is important because it means the person who supplied the information can make sure it was handled right and can have the satisfaction of seeing their contribution immediately used. This has been a big factor in motivating all of us to be as diligent as we can be.
- Completeness:
- Ease of maintenance: Our archives databases are designed so that we can simply enter new information and it is automatically spread to all the places where it should be. All of our 300,000 or so links are automatically maintained. As name changes occur, or as we need to change a SwimmerID, all the links are updated when we next recompile that portion of our digital archives.
- Acknowledgement: Contributors are acknowledged. For the most part, our archives are growing because of the repeated contributions of a fairly small team of people. Preservation of their energy and commmitment is important.
- Volunteerism: The scale of our effort and our level of diligence in capturing history would probably not have been possible if our work were to have been paid for. Recruiting, motivating and acknowledging volunteers has been essential to our work and is expected to continue being essential.
The History & Archives (H&A) RFP and Consultancy
In view of this context and other matters,
the following seem important in establishing our two consultancies.
- No over-budget (or other failure). There is considerable sensitivity in USMS now to budgets and their prudent adminstration.
- All core tables should be SQL. Core tables are those that are the source files for any particular data. Sometimes new tables are derived from core tables. These are not core tables, though they might be stored in SQL for easy access.
- No unnecessary expenditure on APL functionality. Where new procedures can be established with SQL within our budget constraint, SQL should be used. Wherever it is not feasible to convert a procedure to SQL, the APL facility will be converted to work with the SQL database.
- Future maintenance will be by USMS volunteers. All maintenance that can be done with direct addition or editing of on-line databases by whoever on the H&A Committee has permission should be done in that way. For legal reasons, some maintenance will be done by means of compact disks. It is also possible that some procedures can be done in Windows more easily than they can be done in the on-line database. So, the Windows capability on the 9/6/02 compact disk is likely to be continued. Any APL maintenance that is required will be done by Carl. Therefore any and all APL work should be done in a way that Carl can support.
Links from which to learn more
