Hi everyone
Partnership between RL RKC & RL Cares
I have exciting news to share exclusively with RKC members. Following discussions over the past couple of months, I’m pleased to announce that the RKC & RL Cares have agreed to work together to promote the game’s heritage. As part of the link-up, RL Cares will include information about the RKC on their website, and both parties will look at ways to support each other’s work, for the good of the game.
One such example that our members can help with right away, is in supporting the ‘on this day’ feature that RL Cares are running as part of the RFL’s 125th anniversary celebrations. If any members have any information that could be used to support this excellent initiative celebrating the game’s heritage, either by sharing club specific ‘on this day’ items they have already worked on, or by flagging up-coming anniversaries, I would be grateful if they could share, and I can pass on to the RL Cares team. This is a great opportunity for the RKC to show its support for the broader heritage work in RL, so I’d encourage anybody who has anything of use here, to please share.
If anyone has any other ideas on how the two organisations could support each other it would be great to hear these too.
RL Cares will be managing the press release relating to this announcement in the next few days, so this is not intended for further onward communication at this point, but I wanted to share with members first.
I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s great that the RKC has already been recognised for the work we are doing, by the organisation officially charged with responsibility for promoting the games heritage, and I’m really excited that we can be a part of this, and offer help and resource to support. This is entirely in line with our aim to engage with the RL community to support our work, and our intentions to be collaborative & constructive, and work together for the good of RL.
You can find out more about RL Cares on their website here: https://www.rugbyleaguecares.org/ The heritage section of their website is available here: https://www.rugbyleaguecares.org/what-we-do/heritage/
Total RL Forum
Another new development in the last few days is the launch of our official forum, hosted by Total RL. This is now live, and available here: https://www.totalrl.com/forums/index.php?/forum/510-rugby-league-record-keepers-club/
I’m indebted to Mark Kirby for his suggestion to get this up and running, and to John Drake and the Total RL team for supporting our work and agreeing to host.
This is a nice complement to our members only Facebook group, allowing us to interact more broadly with the RL community, and a couple of people have already joined the RKC on the back of this.
E-mails to the whole group will still be the main form of communication on matters of importance & periodic updates on our work, whilst the Facebook group will still provide the means to give more regular updates on our progress, and raise specific queries with fellow members. The forum brings a different angle to discussions, and is more designed for this, allowing members who are not on Facebook the chance to interact with others, and enabling non-members to hear more about our work.
Progress update
Whilst I am on, I thought members would be keen to hear where we are with our work. The picture is complex because of the different stages we are at with different clubs, but I will try and give an overview, and clarify the various steps of our work.
We now have sourced electronic records for all clubs, or, where these don’t exist, have volunteers allocated to type up information relating to the rest. I expect to have in my possession a copy of these electronic records for all clubs and all seasons by the end of June – this would represent some 3,701 seasons in total. At present we have just over 1,000 still to be provided.
Of the approx. 2,700 I have already received, around 1,000 relate to clubs who still have information pending for some seasons, or are defunct clubs who played less than 20 seasons. The next steps on these, once we have all seasons completed, will be to validate the data, by running certain checks, ahead of loading them into our database.
11 clubs, representing 740 seasons are in the process of being validated now – this ensure things like scorers names match those in the line ups, scorers add up to the match score, no duplicated players appear in line-ups, etc, etc
Information from the summer era for 23 clubs, and for all seasons for a further 2 clubs (covering 650 seasons in total) has been successfully loaded into the database, and is now at the stage of being verified – this involves generating player appearance and scoring charts, and agreeing these to existing information / records, and investigating differences. At the same time, players are linked within their individual clubs across multiple seasons they may have played, to create an accurate record for their specific club stats.
Once all the above is completed, a club is consider to be fully loaded into the database, and in due course we will move to the next phase, linking players between different clubs (more on that to follow soon). At present 3 clubs, Swinton, Warrington & Featherstone have been fully loaded.
Hopefully this gives something of an overview, and clarifies the different stages of the process – the combined time relating to all these steps is significant, and I’m indebted to members who are contributing to this; they are far to many to mention (I estimate we have over 50 currently involved in different parts of what is described above), but as we hit key milestones, I’ll endeavour to give a shout out to people involved.
Communications & feedback
I had hoped at some point to publish a newsletter. So far, however, the time required to progress the above matters has been all-consuming. I still hope to get to this at some point, to present things in a more user-friendly way. For now, I thought it better to just capture key points in this way over e-mail. Apologies it’s a little lengthy, and there’s not much style to it, but hopefully there’s some substance at least, and members have found this update interesting and useful. Any feedback on anything we are doing, or could improve on, do differently, or new angles to pursue, would be gratefully received.
Yours in RL
Neil
