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#1
01-22-2013, 10:06 PM
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The DRF online Archive has been down for months now
I'm pretty glad I spent an hour or so a day for over a year reading and studying the on-line archive that had copies of DRF's going back to 1896.
It also was the main driving force allowing a retrospective speed figure to be applied for races across all generations using modern speed handicapping methods, and also based as much on subsequent form as prior form. The commercial figures of today obviously need to be made right away, and subsequent form can't be accounted for because you can't see the future. And the information within result charts and the running times are WAY more accurate than I foolishly thought they'd be. Horse racing was BIG at one time. And a lot of care was put into the timing of the race and chart calling before the official timer came to be. I developed a very great appreciation for two of the writers from the early 1900's who were not only a hundred years ahead of their time, but one of them (Vosburgh) unquestionably had a better understanding of horse racing almost 100 years ago than your above average horse racing writer has today. I hated the writing and coverage of some time periods in the DRF. There were some good writers working in the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's -- but their type of coverage was not the type I appreciate...and a lot of times they showed a very poor understanding of horse racing. The DRF badly tailed away from being a paper geared for handicappers to a paper geared for general horse racing. And from writers who were brutally opinionated and willing to publish gossip all the time ... to writers who just plain lacked balls and didn't deliver much material that would interest me. I would love to see the Archive restored. But, if not, at least I got several hundred if not over a thousand hours out of it...free of charge. 
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#2
01-23-2013, 04:34 AM
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Doug..
Can check with Becky Ryder to see what's up. If you want to reach out to her: becky.ryder@uky.edu
__________________
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. ~ Joseph Conrad A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right. ~ Thomas Paine Don't let anyone tell you that your dreams can't come true. They are only afraid that theirs won't and yours will. ~ Robert Evans
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#3
01-23-2013, 06:06 AM
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Quote:
I would passionately argue the importance of them being available and complete ... but stuff like that is only truly important once you have the kind of fanbase and educated customers that racings want to have, but doesn't. Stuff like Night School and the good work people like BTW are doing on TV and you are doing with your radio show are more important to developing an educated fan base right now ... and you can't make anyone want to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours reading old racing forms just to learn stuff ... but if the sport wants to create a next level from a fan education standpoint ... that material needs to be put out their and especially so in a very convenient searchable format like the Archives website has. If someone ever made me a national racing commissioner, there would be a whole lot of things I'd want to do in terms of reducing takeout, and introducing betting exchanges especially ... but I know none of that stuff would ever get done because of the way things are with politicians and industry people. However, the two things I think I could manage to accomplish, I would see to it that every DRF from 1896 through 2010 is up...and I would see to it that the best horse racing video game of all-time gets made. Basically, two very small victories but they would be victories.
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#4
01-23-2013, 12:35 PM
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Doug.. Good news. Heard back from Becky.. It never left. Base address for Archive changed as Keeneland Library migrates to a new platform! Becky continues to add pages constantly as the pain-staking effort to digitize all of the Telegraph and DRF goes on..
DRF DIGITAL ARCHIVES http://athena.uky.edu/drf/
__________________
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. ~ Joseph Conrad A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right. ~ Thomas Paine Don't let anyone tell you that your dreams can't come true. They are only afraid that theirs won't and yours will. ~ Robert Evans
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#5
01-23-2013, 12:40 PM
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Awesome Steve! Thank you very much. Cute, smart, 19-year-old jockeys with dalmatians for pets can now breath a big sigh of relief everywhere.
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