Hi everyone
Welcome to the first note I’m sending to all our new members as a collective. I’ve spoken to you all in some way over the past few months, but it’s nice to finally be sending a note to the Club as a whole. Let me say again, many thanks to you all for your support: the only way we will achieve our goals is by getting as many people as possible on board to help in whatever way they can, whether that be sharing information, signing up and contributing subs to the set up of the website, typing up records, or anything else. Any help is gratefully received, and what makes the Club work, and if you’re receiving this, you’ve helped in some way; feel free to try and recruit friends and family to also support the cause!
We’ve come a long way in a few short months since the initial idea of re-forming the RKC was discussed, and I’ll be sending something else in the near future to update on the progress of our work in digitising the RL records. But for now I wanted to share some exciting news on another thread of our work.
I have now completed the task to get images of all of the original handwritten team and scorers sheets (aka the ‘Blue Books’) that the original RKC produced. My thanks to Paul Hicks for helping supply some of the images, and the booklets themselves which allowed me to complete the work. Also, thanks to Irvin Saxton, the coordinator of the original RKC work, for giving his blessing for these to be shared. It was always my hope to one day make these more widely available, so they are now available online for members to access. You can find them here: RKC images
You will also find in here the first batch of Irvin’s History of Rugby League booklets, that do a fantastic job of documenting the sport from its formation up to 1980 (after which point the Rothmans & LPL Yearbooks take over). I’m indebted to John Womersley for sharing these: John has also converted to PDF, making the text searchable, and added details like Christian names to help even more.
There are no restrictions on the use of these, but I would point members to our values that are set out in our Framework document. If ever these are shared more widely, please give credit to the RKC for them, and publicise our work; even better, if you think others might want access to these, encourage them to sign up to support our work, and receive this benefit. I hope you will understand the spirit in which this comment is made.
It’s also the right time to set out the structure of how a couple of other things will work, and exclusively reveal the details of our website: Rugby League Records, available at www.rugbyleaguerecords.com will soon be launched, and will be the public face of our work. At this stage, there is no content on the site, but over the next few weeks this will change, and we will officially launch this. Initially the website will be light on detail, and will mainly be a portal to share our aims and progress to any non-members that might be interested.
Whilst our public face will be on the www.rugbyleaguerecords.com site, members will be able to work in the background on the detailed content that we will ultimately add to this. Martin McDonough & I are working on the exact set-up, but this will be the real engine room of our work, and access will be restricted to members. I will share more details in due course, but it’s intended that this will be the place where members can both access our data as we compile it electronically, and contribute to improving the accuracy of it. At the point when we are reasonably satisfied with the quality of the data, we will make this publicly available on our official site.
Finally, whilst a lot of you have already joined up, there are some who haven’t, so a reminder that membership also gets you access to our Facebook group. Whilst the major communications will be over e-mail to ensure that everyone receives them, this is a more interactive way to get involved in discussions with other members, or just observe them. If anyone needs any support getting onto Facebook for the first time, I’m happy to help (it can be done in a way that protects anonymity if you would prefer). The group site can be accessed here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/RLRKC/ Send a request to join, and I’ll approve ASAP.
Hopefully this gives an insight into some of the work that is going on. If anyone is keen to get more involved in helping out, please do get in touch: more typing of the original paper records is still required, and any structured information on players would be much appreciated; I am still searching for anyone who can help with Workington & Whitehaven records too, so any contacts here would be great.
All the best
Neil
