I'm a founding member of the Newcastle University Historic Computing Committee, who work to preserve and promote historic computing artifacts (both hardware and software) from the history of the School of Computing and the wider University.

Current activity

Here's what I'm working on at the moment.

Technical Reports

In 2025 I re-assembled a comprehensive list of the School's Technical Report series. I want to expand the presentation to include per-report pages, listing each report abstract and cross-referencing authors; I want to convert the underlying data-store (a large JSON file) into a relational DB (SQLite or MySQL) and provide the data for interested parties (as a simple download), inviting collaborators (or student projects) to do data-related projects. I'm also interested in enabling projects based on extracting metadata from the scanned reports (e.g. topics, keywords). Collecting this data has revealed some data quality problems in primary stores (e.g. the Library ePrints system) that I wish to collate and report.

PhD Theses

We once had a comprehensive list of all theses ever issued by the School and a complete set of PDFs of them. I would like to restore something like that. Most of the theses are in the Library eThesis collection, although not exposed as a collection, and there are gaps. Part of this work (and the previous item) is to prepare a report for the liason librarian to see about getting the known issues fixed. Another aspect is to look at the School's processes and record keeping to ensure we can cross-check the Library records.

Miscellaneous

Care and feeding of the VM under NUHC (off-site backups, VM configuration and updates, feature requests, bug fixes, user support); maintenance of the committee mailing list (user support, archive backups, list settings); care-taking of the committee shared file store and file archiving etc.

See also

Blog posts: