How we track each swimmers achievements

This description is based on what I hope is a respectful viewpoint. Other people in USMS see things differently. May the dialogue continue. Sincerly, Carl House. That said, here's how we do things at my house.

The most important thing for you to do to make sure your information is correct in our archives & on-line is to make sure the local and national registrars have correct info on you re: name & LMSC & team. If your card is correct, their info is probably correct. If not, contact your local registrar to make it correct and check it on your new card.
Always use in competition the same name that is on your registration card. If you (or a female teammate) legally change your name, then get it changed on your card and always use the new one in competition. When a name changes, it is a good idea to inform me so I can associate your old info and your new info. Someday the national office will do this, but for the time being I do it.
In my view, those who process Top Ten should never change name, LMSC, or club in Top Ten records except in a special way (described below) because when it is changed, the audit trail is lost. Pieter Cath is more willing to change Top Ten info than I would be, and he is the Top Ten chairman, so I don't object to his changes. (Correction of errors in swim time, age group, sex, etc. is beyond the scope of this statement.)
I maintain a "permanent swimmer id" for everyone whose name I recognize in comparing Top Ten with the Registration file, and that permanent swimmer id is added to the Top Ten information. (This comparison is done by computer, not by human eyeballs, so Bob and Robert are not the same.) Sometimes eyeballs will notice such similarities and then the swimmer id might be assigned by a manual change. But that is a courtesy & I don't feel we are obliged to take care of all the situations where names are not the same in Top Ten data as they are in the Registration file.) LMSC & club as reported in the Top Ten information are then replaced by that info from the Registration file. This, in my view, is the only way that Top Ten information should ever be changed by my part of the process except when I have a direct instruction from a very high authority, like the Executive Committee. Whenever we organize information by LMSC or club, this new information as transferred over from the Registration file is used. I never change LMSC or club because somebody contacted me. I only change it because it gets to me thru the Registrar file.
We have pretty good current and archival presentation of Top Ten information thru these rules. I don't expect these rules to change until every USMS registered person has a permanent swimmer id on his card and that id is included in Top Ten information. Then we will have a much better process and the rules will be completely redone. However, there is not much in the works now to include a permanent swimmer id in the registration and Top Ten processes except in the ad hoc way we do it now. So, "pretty good" is the best we can do now. Someday we'll do a lot better.
The following seems very important to me and this belief has impact in everything I do. USMS computer systems and databases should
1. be carefully maintained,
2. audited continually (a complex subject to be addressed elsewhere), and
3. kept in sync with each other by troublefree processes.
4. Processes which require us to be clever are bad processes needy of improvement.
5. At the present time USMS computer processes are visually based processes and very little is underway to make things more automatic. Vast opportunity exists in this regard. Auditing and validity checking may be one of the most important subjects to address.