Report to Delegates before Convention 2001
This is a menu of the topics on this page (click on any): Status Privacy Concerns USMS History & Archives flyer Our Next Challenge .
Status
Identification of swimmers we've named as All-Americans has
continued with substantial effort by Barbara Dunbar and Esther
Lyman with help from many others. We have "identified" all
All-Americans who have had lots of All-American designations, all
recipients of major awards from USMS, and all national officers
since the begining in 1972. We also have all Top Ten achievements
since 1993. We have the ability to bring up from the web all these
achievements and contributions to USMS. And, we can bring up what
we have on any of these 11789 people with a single uncomplicated
URL which uses our "permanent swimmer id".
We believe that the total number of All-Americans ever named by
USMS is 3678.
There are still 8 All-Americans about whom all we know is their
first initial and last name. There are still 246 All-Americans
who are not claimed by any LMSC. There are 413 All-Americans whose
birthday we don't know.
We have stories for 279 USMS people (30 are not yet complete),
contributions in our Oral History from 33 persons, and 81 articles
contributed for our on-line History.
We have 7827 webpages in our digital archives with 218,000 links
connecting them (not counting graphics). These are available at
http://www.SwimGold.org/ or thru http://www.USMS.org/.
The most important improvements in our information from now on will
come as local USMS people claim their All-Americans, as our members
clarify their information, and as stories and oral histories are
collected by and from more USMS people.
We have 594 photos in the "Photo Gallery" which is fully integrated
with our archives. Links to these appear where the swimmer's name
appears in our digital archives.
We have received all the photos published in Swim Magazine since 1995.
This is more than 2000 photos on 32 CDs. These will produce photos
good enough to print in newspapers and magazines for USMS publicity
purposes provided that we get the appropriate permissions. (Most of
the photos we have in the Photo Gallery that were sent by our swimmers
are not good enough to place in print media.)
We have established a presence at the Henning Library at the
International Swimming Hall of Fame by placing there the paper
archives collected by our past Historians including Ham and Mildred
Anderson and Joan Smith. Edie Gruender may have more to contribute.
Our contractual relationship (approved by the HOD of delegates at
last convention) has not yet been initiated.
The work begun by Dorothy and Carl is substantially completed. It is
up to us to determine how well it will be carried forward. I think
she is pleased.
Privacy Concerns
Our biggest effort during the past year was to redesign the
swimmerid so that birthday is encrypted. Conversion of all our
files to use the new swimmerid was a major effort in early summer.
This was important because of privacy concerns. The use of
birthdays in the early years of our effort was very important to
our efforts to identify everyone with reasonable accuracy. It
made our work easier and verifiable. If we had a correct birthday,
someone was "identified". If we didn't have a birthday, they were
not "identified".
USMS History & Archives flyer
Another important accomplishment this past year has been Meegan's
creation of the USMS History & Archives flyer that has helpful tips
for submitting information, including stories, oral history and
photographs.
Our Next Challenge
Our archives reside at SwimGold.org where they were placed
when Dorothy Donnelly and Carl House began this work in 1996.
Every page in our archives website has at least two links to USMS.org,
and there are some links from USMS.org to SwimGold.org. That means
there are about 20,000 links from SwimGold.org to USMS.org. There
are probably fewer than a dozen links from USMS.org to our archives.
The biggest challenge facing us now is that we are being asked by the
current administration of USMS to move all our information to the same
server where USMS.org resides. This question is complicated for several
reasons, and any such move should be done thoughtfully, with a good plan.
- Maintenance of our information on two sites will require more effort. We are already at the maximum effort we can make in the current volunteer effort of our committee.
- Moving our archives to USMS.org could require a great deal of work, depending on how it is done.
- Our archives are managed with a particular approach which is very, very dependent on the permanent swimmer id. Administration of the permanent swimmer id is done on software that can run on the server currently in use by SwimGold (NT Server). It would have to be adapted to run on USMS.org (Unix). Continuing our current development work for USMS archives can be more easily done on NT Server where it already resides.
- There are tens of thousands of entries in major search engines whereby anyone in the world can type in one of our names and find information in our archives. Google, AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos and Yahoo do an especially good job of indexing our archives. The following search engines also index us, though not as deeply: FastSearch, GoTo, MSN, LookSmart and NorthernLight. If we eliminate the information from SwimGold all these links will fail and we will lose value we've created for our swimmers and for our organization in major search engines.
- "SwimGold" is a good name for our archives. USMS could acquire the name if it wished to do so to preserve all this presence in search engines and to control the name for our archives forever.
- Greater integration of our archives with USMS.org could be achieved in several ways without moving SwimGold from the server where it currently resides. We could provide better access from USMS.org to our archives. We could make our archive pages similar in appearance to USMS.org pages.
- If we decide to move our archives to the Unix server where USMS.org resides, we could do several things to preserve our current strength. The name "SwimGold.org" could become subsidiary to USMS.org so that all of our archives could be equally available from either USMS.org or from SwimGold.org. A search on USMS.org would include all of our archives. We could also take steps to preserve our capability for managing our archives. More detail on this can be provided.
