Good references, optimism for making contact

Jim Hogle summarized major staff/faculty people to track down from the most recent decades of the Co-op, which was wonderful. Of particular note is Margaret Handy, house administrator from 1971 - 2000 (!!). (I misinterpreted the sugar maple in the front yard of 05 dedicated to her to mean she had passed. She has not! She's in town and excited to talk with me...)

Most important: HAA is really going to help us out. When i give them the names on the Alumni Master, (with whatever graduation/Co-op year info i can manage,) they will generate and give to us mailing labels for as many as they can manage. Also in this process, they'll update their database with "lived in the Co-op" tags, making up for the slack on this since ~1995. Sweet. In October, when we hopefully complete the Shared Interest Group (SIG) application process, this will have been necessary work for getting full access to our alumni's contact info. Since we should only need to do one big mailing for the Reunion, we shouldn't need the addresses again before October. So when we get the mailing labels, we should make photocopies/scans of the sheets, just in case, but we should hopefully be able to avoid needing to back enter the addresses into a spreadsheet. Good news.

ALSO, HAA is willing to send out an email on our behalf urging alumni to get in contact (with the dudley.coop gmail account or in writing) and to respond if they're interested in forming the Co-op Shared Interest Group. We need 50 alum signatures (virtual ok). Although we can't get specific info for specific people, i'm going to see if we can't be clever and learn plenty of other useful things from these actions they'll take on our behalf:

• Which people are dead? (Most likely to be told.)
  
• Which people don't have HAA records? (Partially evident by lack of a mailing label...)
  
• Do some living people have HAA records but no mailing address? (We'd need to receive a list of names detailing this.)
  
• Does everyone with an HAA record have an @post address? If not, which don't have one? (Again, would need a list. We may need to resend the email using all of our non-@post addresses, possibly resulting in some overlap.)
• May we know who receives the email, if not their particular addresses?
• (Can't an alumnus use the post@harvard site to look up individuals one at a time?)
  
• Which names had spelling mistakes?
  
• May we know degree information for the people for whom we'll receive mailing addresses or who will receive the email? (Least likely.)

Waiting for Cara A. at HAA to call back to get this phase moving. Spoke with Lauren Brodsky yesterday, during which she instructed me on what i'd need to give to Cara. This lead to...

Spreadsheet action: i compared the names of people i'd looked up in yearbooks going back to 1991 (on the Semester Master list) against those already in the Alumni Master list; we don't want repeats. Then i added unique new ones. Then i cleaned up middle names and nicknames. There are still plenty of class lists i could type in, but i'll wait on that; i think for the short term, the "1958-1993 alumni" packet from the archive (who did this?) will be enough to corroborate/add graduation year info for Cara's purposes. Later, because of lower priority, we could use the complete class lists (of which we don't have them all and for which the Harvard Archives or the Yearbook Office might be necessary) to complete the Semester Master list.

The Alumni Master list is now up to about 1150, from 1000 before. Hooray!