In reply to various: What a load of luddites
I'm slightly surprised so many people want to stick with the MLT posting large chunks of dead tree to hundreds of people.
I'm not a great fan of the DLOG interface but everyone seems to completely miss the overall point of the system. The entire administration of all MLT awards, EVERYTHING, is now done via CMS. The whole point is to ensure that no-one involved in the whole process now needs to shuffle a single sheet of paper or put things in the post. That includes everything from booking courses through to the filing of the final reports. You will never need to show anyone anything on paper and you can never lose track of any information about what courses you did and when.
The system is NOT really aimed at logging individual climbs, it is primarily there to provide an ongoing daily (or even weekly/monthly) record of your experience, especially supervision and instructing experience. It handles 'omnibus' entries for multiple days really well and the 'copy record' makes it ease to use for those doing similar sessions or visiting the same venues. The assessor on your MLT course and future employers don't really care which individual routes you've done, they want to know where you go and how often, both individually and as an instructor.
Most importantly, your trainer/assessor as soon as you register for any MLT course gets full access to your DLOG account. They will see immediately whatever you have logged (or added as an attachment) and can discuss/clarify if what you have logged is sufficient for the course. For those that haven't got the correct experience (or just can't be arsed and possibly not someone I'd want instructing my kids?), the trainer/assessor can therefore suggest they cancel or postpone their course booking well in advance rather than have inexperienced idiots turning up on the day and f@#king things up for the staff, themselves and other candidates.
Unfortunately it happens with regular monotony and DLOG is one aspect of efforts to try and reduce it. I'm pretty sure that for most people, having someone waste your valuable time and mess up your highly expensive course is far more of an inconvenience than than not having a 99pence folder or a hardcopy of a 50 page pdf.
Additionally, there is now complete transparency on qualifications. All you need to give prospective employers is your candidate number and they can check your profile on CMS. No more messing around with copies of certificates. No more opportunities for fraud or misrepresentation. You can also 'share' your DLOG with others.
Change is always a pain in the arse. I certainly won't be back dating anything on DLOG, I won't be logging individual gritstone climbs on it and it needs a fairly decent internet connection. However, going forward with my MIC and Development Coach, the ubiquity of DLOG via the internet means that for once I shouldn't be playing catch up sorting my logbook and then printing loads of stuff before an assessment.
As a WORK tool for instructors to meet the mandatory requirement set by their NGB to log experience, DLOG is a good start. For logging my own climbing and or training it sucks but that is rather irrelevant.