from Amazon
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Volunteers for Retrosheet
I thought today after completing a fourth team for retrosheet.org in its’ quest to convert the PDF versions of the daily summary pages provided by the HOF into a digital database that I should speak up here and make my own call for volunteers.
David W. Smith is a generous and brilliant man and his life’s work (in the baseball sense)...to bring high quality data to the masses...has produced tremendous results thus far. The daily summary project is gaining momentum, but there’s really no limit on the number of volunteers they can use over there to get this done in a timely manner.
I should be speaking to the choir when I talk about how critical it is to the future of sabermetric research and to the integrity of our data that we get access to this treasure trove of game by game data that goes back into the 19th century.
I’m asking anyone here who would like to use this data when it becomes available to e-mail David (dwsmith~retrosheet~org, replacing the ~ with the appropriate character) and volunteer your time to enter it for him. You don’thave to spend many hours every day doing this work...you can take more time to do each team...even an hour a day would really help move the project forward (each team takes about 7-8 hours to enter if you’re at all adept with Excel and a keyboard).