dwindling numbers

[whatever]

Is it just me or does it seems to quieter at debates this year? Not as many people seem to showing up.

[RandomMusings]

Pretty full tonight - not a seat to be had just after half 7!

[exnihilo]

I'm very much looking forward to the minute of last night's debate...

[Eliot Wilson]

They produce minutes these days??? Controversial.

[Jessica]

You'd better believe it!

[Owen Wilton]

Attendance

We had approximately 181 people at my Inaugural Debate; we had to turn people away.

Parliament Hall was also filled to capacity for the Global Warming Debate, one of Jessica's great successes. (Sssssibilance). She also retained strong numbers quite far into the semester: there is the almost inevitable "essay dropoff," but Jess sustained the momentum generated by the Orientation Week Debate for quite some time. (The Pornography, Darwin and Obama Debates were excellent.)

We also drew a reasonable crowd (and, more importantly, a fresh one) for the Blind Mirth Debate, which I think we held in the "deadline nadir."

Minutes

Dickie handed me a fascinating book produced by Marcus Booth: it contains "The Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the Board of Ten" with all the relevant minutes and circulated papers of his presidency.

I'm going to resurrect this. Parliament Hall minutes will be produced and posted online; at the end of the year, they will be published in paper form in "STAnsard" (ho ho ho). Minutes from Board meetings will be posted just as soon as they've been adopted; I promise to put them up each Wednesday evening. (Members have already received a copy of the minutes of my first meeting, held on 15th April.)

I have decreed, in that way that I do, that I want the Parliament Hall minutes to be witty productions in themselves, so I'm giving Duncan greater latitude in terms of the deadline for those. I will not insist upon weekly publication. I trust Duncan to do an excellent job; I persuaded him to run, in fact.

I'm willing to assist in the transcription/unearthing of "historic" minutes, by which I mean, those from 2006/7-2008/9. Apparently "The Book" contains some references to Tom Cahn's year. I think the master electronic copies have been destroyed, but I'm prepared to spend some of my summer typing stuff out of The Book. I know that Joe has produced calligraphic minutes and written them into The Book for Jess's year-it should be fairly straightforward to copy those.

I think we may all have to face the possibility that a substantial chunk of the minutes are never going to emerge, but who knows? I have an inkling that the Union Debating Society filing cabinet contains more wondrous secrets than the Vatican Library.

For the moment, I'd point out my predecessor's discovery:

It's the old UDS web site!

http://web.archive.org/web/200502160458 ... ndex.shtml

Including minutes from Board of Ten meetings and debates from the infamous 2003-'03 term - anyone interested in reading contemporary accounts of the events leading up to the fall of the first Board of Ten of that term should check out the minutes from 18 September and 4 October 2002 in particular, and later you can read minutes from the Board that followed it.

[hr]

Psalm 91:7

Thanks for this.

[Owen Wilton]

I should add that I was also impressed by the late candidate for Clerk, Ms Averill, who had clearly bothered to do some research, was obviously keen, and the proud owner of a fountain pen. (Apparently a necessity...) I hope she'll run next year!

It was encouraging to see interest in what can be a thankless position.

[Al]

I have an inkling that the Union Debating Society filing cabinet contains more wondrous secrets than the Vatican Library.

If you find the missing chapters from various books of the Bible, they're mine.

[Edinburgh Boy]

Twas ever thus. Since the beginning of recorded memory (OK, then at least since the 1990s) numbers have flcutuated due to a whole range of reasons.

[David Bean]

Minutes

Dickie handed me a fascinating book produced by Marcus Booth: it contains "The Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the Board of Ten" with all the relevant minutes and circulated papers of his presidency.

How intriguing! Is this a recent publication? He certainly never mentioned it to me, although he and I did discover Graham Stewart's History from 1990. Do you guys still know where to get hold of a copy? If need be I have a photocopy in my hands right now; I must say my eye was drawn to the final paragraph, which is surely as relevant today:

"This is the unfinished history of the Union Debating Society. It is only possible to chart the Society's future once its bearings have been discovered by a knowledge of its past. There have been times when the Society has been close to extinction, only to be saved by the wisdom and the hard work of those who took over its steering. Likewise there have been times when the Society has sailed through good weather only to lose course because of the complacent inattentiveness of those at its helm. So far it has weathered the storm. Future generations may chart a completely different course to that of their predecessors. As long as they realise that they have a responsibility to these predecessors, and that the Society is not theirs to do as they please but merely theirs in trust then there is every reason to believe that the next two hundred years of the Union Debating Society will be as fruitful as the last. Let us wish them well."

Required reading for all new members of the Board of Ten, I'd say!

I'm willing to assist in the transcription/unearthing of "historic" minutes, by which I mean, those from 2006/7-2008/9. Apparently "The Book" contains some references to Tom Cahn's year. I think the master electronic copies have been destroyed, but I'm prepared to spend some of my summer typing stuff out of The Book. I know that Joe has produced calligraphic minutes and written them into The Book for Jess's year-it should be fairly straightforward to copy those.

Why not simply scan and PDF them? Come to think of it, if you could persuade Special Collections in the library to let you, an extremely useful project would be to get the entire extant set of written records available as PDFs online, as is increasingly the trend with important historical data. I went down there to take a look at it just after I was elected Clerk, in 2002 - the earliest I found were from about 1810, but then that was about the time of the merger between the Literary and Philosophical Societies, and it hadn't occurred to me that had I asked for the Literary Society's earliest records I could probably have got us right back to 1794. Now, I'm not sure exactly how one goes about photographing or otherwise producing electronic copies of pages in old books, at least without damaging them, but surely someone in the University must know. You might even be able to gain full co-operation from the University, which could use it as some kind of PR stunt, - you know, a feel-good media story about how a university is allowing public access online to the records of one of its most prestigious student societies, with all the usual chuckles about how some of the more recent efforts at record-keeping have been somewhat less assiduous. Give graduates a reason to feel good about their university, and make them more likely to open their wallets.

I think we may all have to face the possibility that a substantial chunk of the minutes are never going to emerge, but who knows? I have an inkling that the Union Debating Society filing cabinet contains more wondrous secrets than the Vatican Library.

I wouldn't bet the house on it. There is a list of every Convenor and Father of the House in history, at least up to a point after which living memory could easily reconstruct - but I'm sure you must have that already? Come to think of it I might even have the file somewhere on my own computer.

For the moment, I'd point out my predecessor's discovery:

...

Thanks for this.[/quote]

Any time. Actually, looking at the thread somebody requested that those minutes be made available on the new web site alongside the work you're doing, which admittedly to an outsider would make the records look patchier still but would nevertheless be an easy win if you're serious about reconstructing our history.

[exnihilo]

Discovered Graham Stewart's book? That would be my personal copy which I gave to the Society! There is, of course, a copy in the Library too.