Project meeting, 18 March 2014, minutes

Project meeting

Present: Jonathan Blaney [minutes] (JB), Helen Hockx-Yu (HHY), Ralph Schroeder (RS), Jane Winters (JW)

Apologies: Josh Cowls, Eric Meyer, Peter Webster

1 Minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes were accepted as a correct record.

2 Matters arising

One more place on the advisory board remains to be decided.

3 Institutional updates

3.1 British Library

Indexing is on track for completion in mid-April, but the BL has had to swap out one disk because of failure. Three quarters of the first dataset is now indexed; concurrently they are ingesting the second dataset from disks onto their server.

The group discussed the possibility of benchmarking the dataset. If Nominet would be prepared to be involved in the project this would provide valuable, although not necessarily complete, information about the history of UK domain name registration; this contextual information would be very useful to researchers.

3.2 OII

OII members will attend a workshop on web archiving at the Web Science conference.
There may be some overlap between the project and some work being done at Rutgers on the Internet Archive.

3.3 IHR

IHR members have been holding a number of meetings with individuals about the bursaries. One bursary application has already been received.
After discussion with the Traces Through Time project it seems that there may be scope for some of their work on prosopography to be applied to web documents.

4 Bursary administration

It was agreed that the form which this takes is dependent upon the number of applications received. There should be one judge from each partner, plus Niels Brügger if he’s willing. If the number of application is low the panel can read all the submissions; if not there will need to be a sifting process, with applications graded as yes, no, and not sure by two readers.

The group discussed marking the applications 1-5 on a range of attributes. Suggested attributes were:

  1. promise for BUDDAH
  2. person specification
  3. feasibility
  4. overall quality

It was agreed that efforts to keep encouraging people to apply should be maintained.

5 The book

The proposal is being worked on and a draft was circulated. There are many potential contributors already. After the April meeting it may be possible to send the proposal out, even if some of the chapters are indicative rather than final; there is already a strong line up. The main outstanding question is what to do about the bursaries and this probably depends on the nature of the work produced by the bursary holders.
The group agreed that at least one chapter on the BBC would be valuable, but two chapters, one quantitive and one qualitative, might be possible.

6 September meeting

The September meeting, due to be held at Senate House, could be combined with a workshop for researchers, particularly since Niels Brügger is coming to London for the meeting. There are four researcher meetings scheduled for the BL, so the workshop would replace the third of these. The group agreed that this was a good idea.

7 Any other business

7.1

Collaboration agreements still need to be signed off.

7.2

We have a recent graduate from Central Saint Martins who is willing to do the art work for our videos at the budgeted rate. The group agreed that this was a good decision.

7.3

We are coming up to the first quarter and the BL and OII will need to invoice the IHR.