New Ulm Sports Central - Preserving and Sharing New Ulm Area Sports History

Phase II has officially moved to the front in the area’s project for sports history preservation utilizing the world wide web’s internet facilities.

This new phase incorporates inventorying, cataloging and recording details related to the objects involved with the website, New Ulm Sports Central. The initial phase was the organization of the project under the auspices of Community Research Technology, Inc., a non-profit state and federally recognized corporation.

New Ulm Sports Central represents the schools and communities in the New Ulm school district area. New Ulm baseball organizations, Essig, Hanska and Searles and the Junior baseball association have already provided financial support.

The starting work involved the mechanics of the corporation, preliminary organization and planning, and the development of the website itself. With direction and help of South Central College of Mankato, the website was launched in May and by mid-October had already had 25,000 “hits” or viewer access. The initial step was to ensure that 100% of the sports happenings of the current era are digitally preserved for the future.

CRT, Inc. president Herb Schaper explained that the high viewership has been the results of such factors as interest in Jamie Hoffmann’s professional baseball progress, following 11 summer amateur baseball teams featuring the Hanska run to the runner-up state baseball championship, the American Legion state baseball tournament here last July and development of reporting fall sports for New Ulm schools.

The massive job of gathering, researching and duplicating sports information for Phase 2 required the development of a unique data base which will identify the individual objects so they may be searched on-line by the public. Work is already underway in entering data to the data base to provide the clues to find the information. This step also involves on-going research on material on hand to insure completeness and accuracy.

Although every word entered will be search-able, the data base’s main categories of research codes include: date of record of the object, organization location, type of entity, sport, name of team, gender of the participants, conference or league involved, names of data compilers, keyboarding, researchers and donors, original type of the historic object, location where it will be stored, a priority for word required, and an identification to previously indexed resources. A text box allows complete entry of any descriptive material. The text box is also search-able.

Preparing the data form and entry to the website can take anywhere from a minute to an hour. There could be 20,000 pieces estimates Schaper who has been involved in the system design for that work.

The first priority of this step also involves insuring that a hard copy is available for all of the information. Much of that work has already been done by other historians. New Ulm Sports Central, however, desires to have at least two sets of the data in hard copy format in multiple locations.

Phase 3 will involve the digital scanning of photographs and documents for uploading to the internet site. Some technical and procedural questions for this phase still must be resolved.

Methods are under consideration to provide for volunteer and paid manpower to assist in the project.

The organization’s contacts are www.newulmsportscentral.com. nusc@newulmtel.net and 1435 10th S. St., New Ulm, MN 56073.

The group’s dues-paying membership has grown to over 100.

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