LOYALS Volunteer Group

LOYALS Call for Volunteers – Making Flashes Easily Searchable

The existence of Website Tip #5 Searching Old Yearbooks and Flashes, shows that it is too hard to find the great content we have buried in our historical publications. There are tons of great articles about tuning, crew work, tactics, strategy, human interest and specific regattas and specific people. But if you don’t know they exist, or which issue they are in, you will likely give up the search before you find what you need.

The LOYALS have started a project to build an index to this content and make it available online so that members can easily search and find the content they need. But WE NEED YOUR HELP!

The task for volunteers is to skim an issue (they are available on the Class website thanks to a History Fund effort some years back), record the title and author and page number for each article, and enter a brief description/keywords for that article. You’ll be given a one-page Guide to get you started, a simple spreadsheet to fill in and a mentor/reviewer to help you.

We’d like reviewers to sign up to index a years’ worth of issues in a month. Years vary but usually contain 8-12 issues. Our initial efforts suggest you can index an issue in 30 minutes, although your first issue will likely take longer. We’re asking for a commitment of 3-6 hours to index a year of issues. After you complete your initial task, we’d love for you to sign up to index another year, but that is not required.

See the list of Flashes online here.

We have 80 years of issues; we are hoping for at least 10 volunteers. Please contact Bob Shapiro by phone, text or email (978-761-3289, finallybk@gmail.com) if you want to help. Too busy during the summer season? Sign up now to help in October or whenever you will have time.