THE
K'S ARCHIVES
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THE
K'S ARCHIVES
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An
ongoing project to record and preserve the history of Kingstonian FC
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HELP
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DONATIONS
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If
anyone thinks they may have something for the K's archives that can be
donated, borrowed or bought please contact any of the following:
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| The
Site: Please email richard@bubbyworld.com |
| In general I will be the best contact as I have more time to spend on the project. I do not live in the Kingston area any more so if you want to donate something in person then it may be better to use one of the other contacts. However I can still liaise with them and advise you what donations might be of interest. If you think you may have something that helps with the project such as photos, programmes, match reports (other than Surrey Comet and Surrey Advertiser), information on former players, videos (VHS or DVD), memorabilia etc then I am the best contact for this. I will be interested both in physical donations but also digital photos or scans if you do not want to part with the originals. |
| Kingston
Heritage Service: via Kingston History Centre, The Guildhall, High Street, Kingston. KT1 1EU. (Entrance is at the back of the main Guildhall) Telephone 020 8547 6738. Email: local.history@kingston.gov.uk. Website: www.kingston.gov.uk/history. |
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Kingston Heritage Service collects, preserves and provides access to material which tells the history of Kingstonian Football Club. The service (which comprises Kingston Museum and Kingston History centre) currently have a massive collection of programmes and other memorabilia donated by Jill Trevor (listed elsewhere on this site) and from other sources. This is your best contact if you wish to be certain that any donation you make will have a permanent home not subject to the whims of individuals. The History centre is potentially interested in anything of historical significance relating to Kingstonian- please contact the History Centre by email with details in the first instance. For those wishing to view material in person (whether relating to Kingstonian or any other aspect of Kingston's history) it is sensible to contact them in advance as some material is stored off-site and may need to be retrieved before your visit. |
| The
Club: Please see John Fenwick at any game or contact archives@kingstonian.com |
| John is very busy on match days so it is best to contact him beforehand via the above email address. Please help by not using this email for general club business which in any event will be less closely monitored than the other club emails. Although John is involved with the archives, his other club activities leave him very short on spare time so this is the best contact only if you want to offer and make donations in person and can best do this on a match day. |
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HELP
WITH THE WEBSITE
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The
majority of the information needed to put the website together has already
been collected but needs a lot of work to get it into the right web format.
Please contact richard@bubbyworld.com if you can offer to help in any
of the areas listed below:
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| Writers |
| One of the hardest things for me to do is the writing and in particular the write ups for each season. I have done basic summaries for each season but these need to be fleshed out and turned into a good read. I know quite a few people at the club have some journalism experience or write blogs or reports on games, so if anyone fancies a go at this then please get in touch. This would involve taking a whole season, reading through all the reports for that season (matches and events) and turning it into a story with my summaries as a starting guide. To be done well it does involve quite a bit of work but may be interesting and rewarding as well. I would also like to get to the stage where we could produce books on the history of the club but don't have the time or skills to do this and would welcome ideas on this. |
| Editing of match reports |
| This is something that anyone with a computer can help with and may be the biggest bottleneck in completing the site. Currently I have a report (sometimes more than one) of every game K's have ever played where a report existed (thanks to the Surrey Comet coverage this is nearly every game in the club's history from 1885). However these are only in image format (JPG) which is often hard to read. It also means, for example, that people cannot search the site for a relative's name or any other specific thing that they may be looking for. I have used OCR software to convert the reports into text, however given the quality of early newsprint and the copies taken from the newspapers, there are often many corrections to be made to the text file. It totally depends on the copy but it is not uncommon for early newsprint to take up to half an hour to correct just one single report and sometimes it is better just to start from scratch. If anyone can help I can email a jpg/picture copy of an original report and a copy of the text to be corrected. There's no pressure or deadlines or commitment to do loads of reports just the odd one when you have the time. |
| Programme Scans |
| Having got as far as 1960 when the majority of programmes became relatively common this is now a low priority for me to carry on with. However it would be nice to get more seasons up and I have at least 10 more seasons of unedited scans. If anyone is interested then I can send a disc of scans for you to trim and size appropriately. You'll need a program like photoshop and some photo editing experience but all I need back is the edited scans and I can finish off putting them into website format. Although I wouldn't hold you to it, it would only really be worth doing if you were able to do a whole season of home or away programmes. I would therefore need to give you a disc/memory stick rather than via email. It isn't a problem if it takes months or years to get it done as there are unlikely to be any deadlines. |
| Teccie/Design help |
| As
you can no doubt see, I have very limited experience of web design or coding.
If anyone thinks they can make simple improvements to the design of the
site then please get in contact even if this just relates to colours, fonts
and layout. Please be aware though that I don't want to be running scripts
or using complex coding in case something becomes incompatible with later
web browsers or falls over at a later date. I don't want anything that would
make it hard for someone with little web design experience to correct. One specific problem I have at the moment is creating a web page using a similar format to the "freeze panes" function in Excel. Currently the match by match statistics run off the end of the screen so if you scroll right to player 11, for example, you will not be able to see the game he played in as this will be off the left of the screen. I want to set up a fixed row and column header so that when you scroll across the web page to see player names, the details of the match (rows) or the shirt number (columns) are still visible. I'm also wondering if anyone might have better luck than me with converting jpg match reports to text (as detailed above). If you are an expert with software for converting picture to text and want to test whether you can convert these better than I have done, I would be very happy to send you a trial report to test. It would be a significant time saving if we can get reports nearly word perfect on the first conversion. I am also looking for a way to create a web database of all the excel spreadsheets that list individual match details for each season so that information can be pulled from this datafile and slipped into a standard spreadsheet with range of dates to cover the season. This would probably give a big time saving and avoid errors between the spreadsheet and web page and perhaps produce cumulative totals for appearances and goals. |
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Stats
help
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| While I have most match details that are likely to be known (via press cuttings) back to 1885 there are a few recent gaps. Most notably some friendlies from the 1980's onwards and also non playing substitutes from the first two seasons they were allowed in 1966/67 and 1967-68. Please get in contact if you might have this information and I can provide a list. Most likely source would be programmes with team changes noted. Details of reserve games are also quite sketchy so anyone who made notes of these (including final league tables) may be of help. |
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PROGRAMMES
WANTED
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| If
you own any programmes that aren't shown on the programme scans page (there
are also many that are but are not in my own collection) I would love to
be able to get complete scans for the website. I would also be happy to
pay cash (think of a figure, look into my greedy eyes and then double it)
for these if you are willing to sell them. The programmes would go into
my own collection (unless you wanted to donate them to the Kingston History
Centre). I only need about 150 league and cup games since the war mainly
dating from the 1940's and early 1950's although there are some needed from
the early 1970's and early 1980's. Although there are no guarantees, I do
hope to eventually either donate my collection to the Kingston History Centre
or pass them on to a younger fan at the club who is willing to maintain
and improve on the collection. A list of my personal wants list is HERE, although it may not be quite up to date. Please note that even if pre war to early 1950's programmes are shown on the website it is still very likely I may need them for my own collection. This also applies to reserve programmes from the 1940's and 1950's. |