Jonathan Blaney [minutes] (JB), Niels Brügger (NB), Josh Cowls (JC), Ralph Schroeder (RS), Jason Webber (JMW), Peter Webster (PW), Jane Winters (JW)
Apologies: Helen Hockx-Yu, Eric Meyer
Table of Contents
1 Minutes of the previous meeting
Accepted as a correct record.
2 Matters arising
The advisory board now has the agreed number of members.
3 Institutional updates
3.1 BL
The developer resource question is now settled.
The BL recently suffered a considerable hardware failure which has set back the indexing process.
3.2 OII
JC is going to attend a web archiving seminar in Aarhus. Eric Meyer and NB are going to a conference at Harvard.
3.3 IHR
There have been some problems with the project website, as part of problem with all of the School of Advanced Study’s WordPress sites. Fixes have been made and the site seems to be stable now.
4 Communications and publicity
A number of blog posts have been published on the site but more are needed.
5 Bursary applications
A tweet about the bursaries was one of the most retweeted thing ever on the IHR’s timeline. Three applications have been received already; four conversations about individual submissions have also taken place; more general email queries have also been received.
6 The book
We have a good list of things that could go to a publisher very soon and are now in a position to pull it all together. Five proposals from the OII have been received, all on the UK. At least one chapter will be on the projects. We also have some international perspectives. A framing introduction will be written by NB and RS.
The group discussed if there would there be any peer review of material that gets added to the website, like datasets. This would make it into a publication. This is a rare example with a set of static big data that is susceptible to peer review.
The group agreed that it’s not quite clear how big the archive is and we should find out, particularly for the researchers. It may be able to be derived from Nominet data. This is important because people will make claims for their findings. We need to be transparent about how hard it is to know how complete the dataset is. The bias is blind, so it’s probably a fair sample, even if it is a sample. There is also the issue of depth of crawl: the Internet Archive started off crawling only top page and next level and then went deeper, but unsystematically.
7 Advisory board meetings
It was agreed that ideally the advisory board could meet on the day of the September workshop, and there could perhaps be another meeting in the new year to discuss further developments after the project finishes.
8 Any other business
It was agreed that the date and venue of the next meeting would be Wednesday 18th June at 1.00 the OII.