Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

The IT challenge facing the New York Road Runners Club (NYRR) was daunting: to digitize all its race results since 1990 and make the data available online in a searchable database. By the way, the database would have to include the results of all race finishers — NYRR members and non-members alike. So, we're talking about scanning endless pages of race result, some of which are hand written. Then there's the painstaking task of cleaning up the scanner's misinterpretations. Where the results are incomplete, the club has to refer to local newspapers and back issues of specialist magazines such as New York Runner. Alice Schneider, NYRR's outgoing VP of IT, spearheaded the project and also wrote a program to upload the results to the NYRR's data system. Take a look at this work in progress at www.nyrr.org/results.

This is actually the second phase of a project started three years ago. Back then Schneider and her team developed a search engine to comb results of past New York City Marathons. The engine can access results by entrant name, year, time range, country and other parameters. To see it in operation, check out www.ingnycmarathon.org/results. And, who knows, maybe we can get the name in there this year.