Archive Professionalism

Status of USMS Digital Archives

The digital archives of USMS have been assembled and integrated by dedicated volunteers, each using the best tools available to them. The most difficult job has been identifying prominent swimmers in our history and integrating all the databases so that it has become easy to find all that we have on any particular person who is prominent in our history. Birthday was used as the identifier, and that work has been taken about as near to completion as it will get. To understand that job, consider that we had many databases with hundreds of thousands of records and no reliable key field to tie them all together. Historically, USMS people have considered name and age to be sufficient information to identify someone, but we now know that this was inadequate because people's names change and are often misspelled or treated differently.

There are still 9 All-Americans about whom all we know is their first initial and last name. There are still 270 All-Americans who are not claimed by any LMSC. There are 442 All-Americans whose birthday we don't know. (as of 6/17/01) At this point we recognize that we aren't likely to make much more progress identifying these people. For this reason, and because of privacy concerns, we have given up the use of undisguised birthday in the SwimmerID.

At this point we have 8,217 web pages of information with 212,309 links relating them to each other.

So far all of our work has been done by volunteers, each using the best tools available to them. Even when professional skills were needed, as for cryptology skills to encode birthdays, we were able to find a volunteer to provide the required assistance. The current situation is that we are dependent on the particular volunteers who have been doing this work. It would not be easy to move this work to a new leadership should these volunteers become unavailable.

Next Steps for Digital Archives

It is now time to integrate all this work into a modern database that is consistent with the directions being taken elsewhere in USMS. This will provide benefits in the safety of our information, in better ability to share work, and less demand on the time of core volunteers.

• Database software will be selected that is compatible with the USMS on-line effort. For planning purposes, we are assuming Access or SQL Server.
• All current digital archives will be converted to that format.
• Existing tools for managing the databases will be converted or replaced to be compatible with the new database environment.
• In the biggest sense, this will be a gradual process, but professional assistance will be required to set us in the new direction. It is proposed that a consultant be retained to do this quickly and efficiently. It will require considerable time for all the nuances of this shift to be worked out, but it is anticipated that the paid consultancy will have the following accomplishments very quickly.
  • All databases will be in the new environment.
  • Sufficient conversion of existing software tools will be made so that updates to the databases will be done in the new environment.
  • On-line availability of our digital archives will not be interrupted and future maintenance of on-line archives will be from the new environment.
  • A few small tasks might be done to help USMS processes: e.g.
    • Write an Excel macro version of our code to encrypt and unencyrpt birthday.
    • Write a version of our encryption code for use with Access or SQL Server.
    • Enable USMS archives to be presented on a CD. This requires autostart code and the ability for a search engine to reside on the CD. This will have two benefits. First, the CD can include files too big for internet access with a normal connection. Second, a person with an old, slow computer can work with our archives in a satisfactory way without internet access.
    • The consultant should review our procedures for adding content to our archives and recommend any ways he sees whereby substantial improvement can be made at modest cost. The ability to handle on-line interactive contributions is the most obvious improvement.
• The cost of this consultancy will be $5000 to be paid to the consultant plus an estimated $1000 in expenses for Carl House to work with them.
• There is only one consultant capable of doing this work at this price and that is Cognos, Inc., a large computer consulting firm located in Canada. The work will be done by their wholly owned subsidiary APL2000, Inc. which is located in Princeton, New Jersey. The reason they can do this is they have already been working with Carl for many years and have been his advisors in creating the volunteer tools that have been used in our archives work thus far.
• It is not clear whether or not USMS archives can be placed on the new USMS server. Our archives needs were not considered in selecting the new server, and it may be more costly in time and money to move to the new server than to use another. The key here is that we are going to use existing tools and software whereever possible. Clearly, however, at the conclusion of this consultancy we will be closer to being able to integrate our work with other USMS work than we are now.
• It is believed that the cost of this consultancy can be covered by unspent budget dollars intended for our contract for services with the Henning Library.

This effort will be the first time that money has been spent by the History and Archives Committee for professional services and it is expected that most future work will continue to be done by volunteers led by the current core volunteers.

There will be reduced effort required by volunteers because one of the benefits of this new direction will be greater interactivity. For example, contributions to the Oral History project will be able to be made on-line in the future. Documentation of photographs will be done on line. Other updates to our databases will be done on-line as well. Some progress in this direction will be achieved during the consultancy.

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