Alfonso, MarkR, Rich, Melvyn and PaulT:
Since this USGA Architecture Archive idea began about four years ago, it's been quite an interesting journey, at least for me (and a few of my friends) and I'm not just talking about the identification and discovering of the potential Mother Lode of old and interesting information that is and may be out there PIECEMEAL here and there in nooks and crannies all around the world, certainly including Continental Europe, although that part has been an interesting journey too. Other than the piecemeal stuff that is generally in and around clubs, there is stuff out there in collections of one form of disorganization or another, most of it virtually unknown except to its possessors. And then there are the periodicals and books and most certainly the architectural plans and particularly the photographs, including the always fascinating and useful aerials. Going after this stuff is like some massive archaeological journey with no particular specific locations in mind or identified. The best way to get effective with that is good old fashioned personal net-working and for that a website like this one could not be better, but as we see on here even that has its drawbacks and obstacles. I think the reason for that is on a site like this one information is a form of currency and people tend to get proprietary with this kind of information “currency” and they probably do that for their own personal agendas such as trying to make a name for themselves in this world of golf course architecture, certainly including research.
That's just a part of it. The other part is the organizational structure to effectively monitor the sweeping up, organizing, cataloguing, appraising, properly preserving, copyright checking etc of all this information. After that, once you find it and identify and analyze its importance, you have to figure out how best to make it available. Of course there is always the traditional “once place” museum and research center structure but today we are so fortunate to have digitizing and the INTERNET, because its information dissemination is more effective by a factor of many thousands compared to the method before the Internet.
All of this takes MONEY and “man-power” time. Who’s going to pay for all this and sweep it into some central respository and then most effectively dissemination that lode of information in the most educational and useful way including the Internet?
Well, I guess we think the USGA will and they have most certainly made the initial effort and are on track to do it but how fast and how comprehensively we can’t tell yet.
There is also the question of what they will concentrate on, at least initially. It looks like they will concentrate on American golf architecture and its history, at least at first. We did make the suggestion in the beginning that they should go world-wide because nobody else seems to be doing it.
I feel there is and always has been a certain dynamic between the R&A and the USGA and it goes back over a hundred years. I’d call it the dynamic of proprietariness on the one hand and the spirit of unity on the other hand. Right now I think they are more on the side of the spirit of unity.
But if the R&A or anyone close to the R&A wants the USGA to help out with the R&A’s historic architectural material, in my opinion, the R&A should come to the USGA with a really good proposal on how to do that because I really doubt the USGA is interested in being asked to do it all for them and having to pay for it too. And why should they other than for the greater good of architecture world-wide? I think if this is going to work well in the future there will need to be a real collaborative effort in both man-power and financial resources up and down the latter and all around the world. And to do that there will need to be someone to really lead the entire thing. That’s not me---I’m sort of a basic concept guy who has some problems following through on the details on down the line. Plus there’s a lot of the nitty gritty Internet structure stuff I don’t understand very well. That's the good news with the USGA---they have people who are good at that and do it for them.
And if all this interesting information is going to be digitized and INTERNET disseminated, as you know it really doesn’t matter from whose website it comes---frankly it can probably all be massively Hyperlinked anyway into menu structures and such, but even that takes a lot of organization and collaboration and cooperation, and "man-power" time and money. The world wide communication and information network really doesn’t even look at that or care about it anything like they way we once did when material was just reposited in some single place.
So make some suggestions if you want but try to make them really sensible and realistic in the over-all if they’re ever to be utilized and become effective. In the past I’ve been kind of surprised by the naivete on something like this from people I would not have expected to be naïve.
It’s been quite a journey so far, even if it’s probably not far down the road in the grand scheme of things and I do wonder where it will go from here and where it will end up someday. But I firmly believe it is definitely something that should be done somehow and really comprehensively. I think it is totally necessary for the future of golf and golf architecture.