Episode 52 - Tony Persoglia and the Victorian Football Club Archive

Download and listen to this episode here.

We begin the episode with the clean up, noting that Mark Boric has been going through his personal archives, but also uploading match programs from Adelaide United's first season, which was spent in the final season of the NSL. 

And of course George Cotsanis is still pumping out the interviews.

More problematic - for Ian, at least - is the work of Garry MacKenzie. Garry may have found that John Jaap - the man who Ian had credited as being responsible for the 1875 soccer match at the Woogaroo Asylum - may not have actually been the person responsible for that after all. Jaap may have been ill and way at the time, and may also have been older than previously thought. It's a good problem to have though - another avenue of inquiry opened, and the reassurance that people are still engaged with that research.

Paul then launches into a spiel of sorts on the Wayback Machine, the perennially frustrating but still invaluable resource for looking at the history of the internet. Paul's discussions ranges from

• A very rough introduction of how to search for material within the database, using either exact web addresses, or carefully chosen key words.
• Dead ends, dead links, and workarounds which only sometimes work - and the many things which will remain out of reach.
• Old South Melbourne stuff that even Paul was not aware of including a column from then South coach Ange Postecoglou
• The need for patience and persistence, especially when one is unable to access videos and other documents.
• The ability to, that aforementioned persistence and patience, still be able find and salvage photos, match reports, histories, and all sorts of other details.

In our middle segment we welcome back Tony Persoglia to the show. Tony has just completed a massive update to the Victorian Football Club Archive on OzFootball. In this wide-ranging chat, we cover

• The original impetus to start the project
• What's included in this update - including an expansion of club entries, an index of clubs and names, club merger and split information, 
• The technological framework that underpins (and sometimes hinders) a project such as this.
• The possibilities and difficulties in applying the work done here to different sets - whether that be other states, regional areas, and for women's football.
• What's next in the immediate future for Tony's OzFootball work.

Finally, a packed 100 Years Ago Today. prefaced by a note by Ian on vagaries of searching through Trove. We begin in New South Wales and Uralla and a team from Bananaland; state team selection news from Newcastle; still looking ahead to the North vs South game in Tasmania; a strangely written but information rich item from Western Australia, which includes references to Perth to Wyalcatchem; more on the Queensland team's tour of New South Wales, this time on the south coast; and finally to Melbourne for the results, but especially two very different views of the same controversial incident.