It may be much less than half the cost of this year’s 
lympiad since the total cost has not yet been determined. And don’t get your hopes up for a breakdown of the figures.
One possible measure of how much interest there would be in a ‘turnkey club program’:
There hasn’t been a post in the Clubs forum since early July.
For that matter how much actual demand for Pre-1991 ratings being online is there?
I would say that the concept of a turnkey club program would be very useful to have as a resource. If developed for little or no cost, which is how I see it being created, it would be a win for USCF to have, regardless of how much traffic it gets.
As for pre-MSA information, demand is not the primary consideration. I think there is a great deal of value in having pre-1991 tournament and rating information available, both for current TDs who have to deal with long-inactive players and for historical/archival purposes. Again, I don’t see USCF paying a lot to have this done - but there are people willing to do it on a volunteer basis.
If USCF really saw no value in pre-MSA information, we would’ve destroyed those printouts by now. Since we have them, it follows that we see a reason to keep them. If they can be transferred to electronic form, that would be good. If that can be done with volunteers, I have a hard time seeing the downside to USCF.
Oh, there are probably no more than a half dozen members clamoring for pre 1992 crosstables here on the Forums.
We don’t have good records of exactly when someone first became a USCF member. We do know there were around 7900 individuals who were life members in 1984. 6866 of them are still considered current members. (See the latest Expiration Audit report.)
Anyone who has all the rating supplement diskettes can look to see what the highest ID was on them for the first set of supplement files, issued in June of 1992. That ID appears to be 12575108. (IDs that begin with a ‘2’ were not issued in sequential order, so those need to be ignored.)
There are about 17,800 IDs on the latest Gold Master file that are current members and have an ID of 12575108 or lower.
There were many IDs purged from the USCF’s computers in the 1980’s and 1990’s, how many of those will show up on old crosstables remains to be seen.
At present, the USCF is testing entry of historical events using office staff. The first such events should be added to MSA next month.
Whether it would be possible to ship crosstables to volunteers remains to be determined. (If the USCF has to photocopy those printouts before sending them, that could actually increase the total workload significantly.)
I just had a bizarre thought. (I know I know all of my postings are bizarre!)
Nevertheless, here goes. If there is a University near Crossville, perhaps a phone call to the school’s history or library science departments or social science departments may be in order. There may very well be grad students who would tackle the pre-1991 project as a thesis subject. Open up your archives and it could be a win win situation. They might even offer to help with website design. Also offer summer internships. Students may even get college credit “independent study” since we are a not-for-profit
Knoxville (east) looks to be roughly 50 miles away (as the crow flies). Nashville (west) is a bit more than twice that. Chattanooga (south) is between those distances. Murfeesboro (west) is technically closer but probably a longer drive. Cookeville (west) is closer than the other towns (36 miles or 40 minutes), making TN Tech a possibility.
Even a Community College student. Or an instructor there or a high school teacher who wishes to get a higher degree and is searching for ideas to pursue.
Apparently more than we thought.
Also, getting the information pdf’ed would allow for electronic storage to replace paper storage.
Getting it pdf’ed would allow volunteers to OCR and proof it also.
Getting it PDF’d is likely to cost about 10 grand.
Not to mention the players from this era after years of inactivity “came back from the
cold” with a new USCF ID and started to play again. Seems to me duplication might
be a problem.
Rob Jones
In the over 1,000 USCF rated events I have run, perhaps 5-7 times have individuals
from pre-1991 returned, and looking up such data necessary. Generally, somewhere
such data is available so that a rating can be assigned.
It is hard to believe that the demand for this data would be better than marginal at best. The man-hours required to sift through and data entry this data would be
both laborious and expensive–and to what end??
In regard to the “norm” and category program in place now, which USCF has been
promoting and as of yet, by all appearances, there is hardly any demand for, it would
seem folly to invest the resources necessary to achieve pre-1991 data as well.
At a time when there are huge needs to update the USCF website, for new computers,
etc, “looking at yesteryear” rather than the future, does not seem really prudent.
Rob Jones
No one argued that there was a huge demand - only that there was more demand than one would have thought. No one argued that any significant (i.e. read any hard dollar costs) should be used on the issue either.
I think in terms of the record retention, and space to be permanently saved, there is an argument for USCF to spend a few thousand dollars on having the records converted to an electronic format. I assume this is approximately 1/3 of the cost. I would think that if we could fundraise a portion of the difference that it would make sense to convert the data. Once that is accomplished, volunteer efforts can put the electronic data into a more useable format.
I’ve always been about USCF creating infrastructure and leveraging volunteers Rob, to increase efficiency and keep costs low.
Apparently less than we thought, except perhaps by a few on the
forums, who repeat the same requests consistently. Seems to me that
the quite huge obstacles to this such as the costs of crunching paper
data bases into the electronic era, converting old forms of electronic
media into that which is readable today, seem to be hardly justifiable
given the significant other real financial needs USCF has, such as
updating the website infrastructure. Perhaps a great sign of such
interest would be those who speak so highly of this need start a
collection pool to help finance this so-called need.
Rob Jones
Well, since it seems that many thought the demand would be zero, and since several people have expressed interest, your comment would be wrong.
The costs are not insignificant to USCF but are not great. There is some value to USCF to get rid of the paper storage and to get things into an electronic format. This is why I’ve made the point that it may be worth a few thousand dollars of USCF’s money - probably not more - and the cost is probably around $10k-ish. So some fundraising would be necessary. I doubt very much that if USCF could have the project done for no out-of-pocket cost that they would find it totally unappealing.
So no, not really a huge obstacle.
Again, this part can likely be done by volunteers at no incremental cost. Or at least started by volunteers. It doesn’t strike me as a project that is any rush to get completed once the basic data is electronic.
As I have already said, it doesn’t make sense to start looking for donations until after USCF is a 501(c)-3.
Kevin, what is the point in converting what USCF does have in the
way of electronic and paper data, knowing full well that holes will
still exist which could render the results of such compilations questionable??? Is a history akin to “Roots” acceptable??
Rob Jones
I will let the librarians in our midst answer the question about
the long-term viability of paper and old electronic medium storage. But, if viable, in terms of the cost of space required,
and in the preservation of such data, why is imminent conversion really necessary?? Why not leave the data as is,
simply a source of information for the dedicated researcher??
Rob Jones
- Paper degrades. Electronic media is refreshed.
- Paper can be lost to disaster, electronic media is backed up.
- Paper takes significant space. Electronic media does not.
- Paper is available only to those who are physically present, electronic media is available to anyone with Internet access.
- Paper requires physically diligent search to find information, electronic data can be searched and indexed by computers.
All the same reasons why libraries, google, colleges, and any other information repository is moving toward electronic storage. The same reason we are moving away from books toward chess databases. etc.
What if some of your data is on 5.25" or 3.5" disks? Any device around today that can read tournament reports sent in on old disks? When I did some of my first rating reports on a chess league it was on a TRS-80 computer with 2 64K (gasp!) disk drives. I think that machine is lying among some dinosaur bones.
In addition to media becoming obsolete (I still have some 8" floppy disks, the ones you see in the movie Wargames, though nothing that can read them), magnetic media does degrade over time. I have some ZIP drives from the early 1990’s that now have uncorrectable errors when I try to read them.
Many government agencies have data on magnetic tape from the 60’s that are in serious danger of being unreadable. By contrast, the Census Bureau’s paper records from the early 1900’s are still in good shape.
Some sources have said that CDs and DVDs may have a readable lifetime of as short as 10-20 years.
Keeping multiple copies of important electronic archives in multiple locations, and copying them to newer media periodically as equipment is upgraded seems to be the best solution, and it isn’t perfect or cost-free.