Tuesday 27th August 2013
DEDICATED Sons fans with time on their hands are required to help with a new DFC archive website.
Niall Harkiss, who is a designer of heritage sites and has completed similar projects at Dundee Utd and Ross County, has volunteered to get the project up and running.
Niall’s dad, Jim, is a long-time Sons fan and via his company Metalwork UK has been involved with sponsorship at DFC and at one time helped the Sonstrust travel section.
Although Niall is a Dundee United fan, he has, thanks to his father, a soft spot for Dumbarton.
He said : “The Sons archive will be built on a MySQL database platform using PHP pages to display countless pages of statistics, detailing every major competitive match played by the Sons, and pages for every player to have tread on grass in competitive action.
“I’d would like to appeal to any Sons fan who wishes to help with this project, either as a researcher, collector, number puncher or anything else, please get in touch.
“In the initial stages we’d need people for the following roles.
“On players, we’d like someone to research and populate player info pages in the database, 1872-present day. We have basic forms for this in the admin section that I can make available to individuals assisting with this. This usually includes player full name, date of birth, place of birth, signing date and a short bio.
“We need an attendance researcher. Someone who can hunt down and validate attendances from newspaper archives or other sites.
“Match Programmes – Someone who has, or can work with people who do have, substantial programme collections, home and away from Sons games. Someone who owns a scanner and can see their way, over a period of time, to scanning the front covers.
“We are in the very early stages of planning and nothing is live yet.
“We have a good bit of work to do before we can go public with the site and if any Sons fan can help with what we need, please get in touch.”
Niall’s contact e-mail address is niall@taindigital.co.uk
Alan Findlay