This report combines the Editor’s and Events officer reports.

Digitizing the historic Vector journal

The EGM held in August agreed expenditure on digitizing the printed Vector journal and this is in progress. Dyalog donated a set of Vectors to be sacrificed for this process and these are processed.

There will be a single PDF document for each issue of Vector, these PDFs will be text searchable and they will be available for download from the Vector website. This will make the whole Vector journal available online for the first time.

A future goal is to split these journals into their constituent papers and catalogue them in a meaningful way. I would welcome any volunteers to help in that process.

Webinars and live meetings

Webinars: These have continued on a bi-weekly basis and are now in their third year. I see no reason for these to stop as long as people continue to turn up. Thank you to all those who have regularly attended and contributed to these sessions

I would like to give a big thank you to Adám Brudzewsky for his frequent impromptu and practical demonstrations of APL approaches to topics that arise in the Open Sessions. I for one have learned a thing or two along the way.

Symposia: Sadly these have been suspended since March 2020 due to the pandemic. I think it is unlikely that they will resume and I feel this is a great shame. These events began in November 2008 as an informal rendezvous in an upstairs room of a succession of pubs in the city. Unfortunately the Hoop and Grapes, our longest standing venue, remains closed until further notice.

A few people have expressed a strong interest in resuming live meetings and I agree with the sentiment. However, I think it would not be easy to scout out a new venue. So I have asked proposed an agenda item to discuss the prospect of holding a live meeting perhaps twice a year. I would see these as being along the lines of the mini-conference planned for March 2020, possibly at the “Worshipful Company of Information Technologists” at Smithfield.

Consolidating the web sites

At the moment we have three separate sites:

  • britishaplassociation.org containing posts on news, events and reports such as this page. Material can be posted by committee members and sustaining members.
  • vector.org.uk contain papers and articles produced by authors. Some material has been moved from the transferred from the original archive. A few papers have been produced by the authors directly onto the site.
  • archive.vector.org.uk is the original online archive and contains a catalogue to the Vector journal and some published papers. The larger part of the back catalogue only exists on paper.

We still have a plan to merge the first two sites into a single site. We think this will be easier to manage and will offer greater scope to support publishing papers and also add presentations to the journal.

There are no changes intended for the original archive and this will stay in place. There are a number other sites that link to the papers on this site and we would not want to break these links. However, this site is degrading as time passes and there will come a point when it content will have been replaced and indeed extended when the digitized copies of Vector become available.