International Council on English Braille (ICEB),
UBC Committee 2 Archives

Monthly Deliberations Records

The deliberations record for a given month includes all the messages sent by committee members and observers during that month. This record extends back to the beginning of Committee 2's work, in June 1992. Early messages were posted to a bulletin-board system (BBS). Later, this was changed to an Internet mail-list, <ubc2@iceb.org>, but the BBS was also maintained for archiving purposes, being finally dismantled toward the end of 1997.

Each file is a standard ZIP archive, given a first name that starts with the two characters "c2" followed by the 4-digit year and a one-character month digit (with a = October, b = November, and c = December). Thus "c21997b.zip" is the record for November 1997. This convention is maintained throughout. The storage and naming conventions for the messages WITHIN each archive is a little different for different periods of time, as detailed in the next few paragraphs.

June 1992 through June 1993: During the first few months, messages were named according to a simple scheme starting with the author's initials and then some letters summarizing the subject.

July 1993 through December 1997: As the message volume became more frequent, a date code was substituted for the "subject" component of the name. During this period, most messages are individual files whose first name consists of the following components:

The file name extension would be appropriate to the type of file, usually ".txt" for "text". So, for instance, "ef7312.txt" is the message sent by Emerson Foulke on March 12, 1997, which would be found in archive c219973.zip. Note that the initials "zs" were reserved for messages from the chair as such, e.g. meeting status reports.

January 1998 through December 1998: Because of technical changes in the way that the chair handled messages, the contents of a monthly archive would generally be just a single text file, containing the messages for that month in (approximately) chronological sequence separated by short lines of hyphens. The name of that text file would be the same as the archive name, except that the extension would be TXT. Because individual messages were no longer being kept in separate files, and also for other reasons related to the project duration and the number of participants, the naming convention described in the preceding paragraph was dropped as a consistent formality applied to all messages. However, it continued to be used as a convenience for some internal reference purposes, e.g. as a "name" for motions.

January 1999 through August 2002: Due to another small technical change, the monthly text file is now a "standard mailbox" of the kind used by a number of popular mail handling systems (e.g. Eudora). The extension has accordingly changed from TXT to MBX. Likewise the hyphens-separator line no longer appears; instead, each message is preceded by a line starting with the exact text:
From ???@???
(followed by a date on the same line).

This archive was discontinued as of the end of August, 2002; see the UEBC Project Information page for information on later archives.

In those months where one or more messages contained attachments, there will be a second archive having the characteristic extension ".zia". This is also a standard ZIP file, containing all the attachments sent in that month.

With each archive, the size in bytes is given so that you can verify that you received a complete download. Note that some browsers may not automatically recognize a binary file for downloading, and will instead try to open the file as a regular Web page -- in which case it will look like "garbage" on the screen. If this happens, please try another browser, and if all else fails, try contacting the Webmaster (see below) for other options.


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Page content last updated: November 1, 2002