47 



Standardized Service Records 



The experience of the present year has strengthened the convic- 

 tion of the Committee respecting the wisdom of the recommendation 

 made last year for the standardization of service records of marine 

 piling. The scope of the information respecting the history of piling, 

 through treatment or fabrication, handling and installation, as well as 

 subsequent inspection and repair or replacement, which is needed for 

 adequate interpretation and the greatest usefulness of service records 

 has increased with the study devoted to the subject. Present methods 

 in respect to service records are of all degrees of incompleteness, as 

 well as of lack of uniformity in the information which is recorded. 

 Much of the information which would now be valuable and which the 

 Committee would like to obtain respecting piling installed in the past 

 is doubtless irretrievably lost. 



No engineer who has studied the matter, however, can doubt that 

 the keeping of adequate service records would save many times their 

 extra cost to any company, in the information preserved for future 

 guidance in design and contracts. Nor can he doubt that if such 

 records were kept on a mutually consistent basis and in harmonious 

 form, for the majority of marine structures in San Francisco Bay, 

 their value for future cooperative studies would be very great, in con- 

 tributing to the improvement of future piling and the increasing of 

 its service life. 



The diversity of the needs of different concerns and their financial 

 limitations on the extent to which they can go, as well as the individ- 

 ual preferences of engineers, make the specific organization of service 

 record systems a matter which must largely be worked out for each 

 individual case. That greater harmony is desirable no one can doubt. 



As to method, any recommendation toward this end must await 

 more intensive and detailed study than has yet been given to the 

 subject. In the meantime, however, much can be done toward in- 

 creasing the adequacy of service records by a study on the part of 

 engineers of the possibility of incorporating in their records items not 

 now recorded but for which it is seen (by even such limited question- 

 aires as the one which this Committee now presents) that there will 

 be future need. It is believed that a helpful scheme, often missing in 

 yirvice record systems, is a service record -central correlating or index 

 file, through which all service record data can be located, data which 

 for any reason must be filed elsewhere being represented by cross ref- 

 erence. The Committee's service record report form, it is hoped, may 

 offer some suggestions in regard to the contents and organization of 

 such a file. 



Summary of Conclusions 



In concluding the service records sections it seems desirable to re- 

 state the summary given in the report of last year, with the modifica- 



