I'm interested to know if its possible to locate results from decades back, beginning about 1990 and forward to the ones available here at usms.org now?
No, not easy, it's a lot of work no matter how you slice it. I did it for many old running events. I started by badgering several old-timers who I knew were pack rats and might have old results stashed away. Once I had a hard copy, I ran it through ABBY FineReader, an optical character recognition app. Even then with really poor copy you will have to make a lot of manual edits since you can see far better than the OCR. This isn't usually a problem until you get into the early 80s. Then I used an app called TextPad to do word frequency counts across multiple files to find matches in names. Still, there's some deduction needed with name, location and age to determine if they are the same people. The difficult ones are women who change their surnames. You simply have to know them to get that right, or once again pick the brains of the old-timers. You'll get it 99% correct, but have to invest many hours.
No, not easy, it's a lot of work no matter how you slice it. I did it for many old running events. I started by badgering several old-timers who I knew were pack rats and might have old results stashed away. Once I had a hard copy, I ran it through ABBY FineReader, an optical character recognition app. Even then with really poor copy you will have to make a lot of manual edits since you can see far better than the OCR. This isn't usually a problem until you get into the early 80s. Then I used an app called TextPad to do word frequency counts across multiple files to find matches in names. Still, there's some deduction needed with name, location and age to determine if they are the same people. The difficult ones are women who change their surnames. You simply have to know them to get that right, or once again pick the brains of the old-timers. You'll get it 99% correct, but have to invest many hours.
