A record that outlasts the season

I’m Sam Perillo. I march with the University of Utah Marching Utes, and before that I marched at Herriman High School. This is a project by somebody still in the activity rather than somebody looking back at it.

Marching band is documented worse than almost anything that takes this much work. A circuit posts a running order and takes it down when the season ends. Results are read out once in a stadium. A production that four hundred people rehearsed for five months leaves behind a schedule PDF and whatever anybody happened to film. Ask what a program performed six years ago and there is often no answer that does not depend on somebody remembering.

So the Atlas is built the way an archive is built rather than the way a scoreboard is. Every date and running order is cited back to whoever published it. Where the circuits publish nothing — scores, repertoire — it says so plainly instead of leaving a blank that reads like a bug. Nothing is ranked across events, because placement was awarded within a class on one night and anything else would be a claim the sources never made.

The other half is the part a database cannot do on its own. This activity is enormous and it barely knows itself — programs two hours apart share nothing, and a student has no way to see what anybody else is doing. Anyone can propose a correction here, every contribution is reviewed before it lands, and where information came from stays visible. A record that the people in the activity build together is the only kind that will still be here in ten years.