2015-01-03: Review of WS-DL's 2014

The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group's 2014 was even better than our 2013.  First, we graduated two PhD students and had many other students advance their status:

• Ahmed AlSum defended his Ph.D. on February 26, 2014 and joined the Stanford University Libraries after his defense.  It was Ahmed that started the WSDL tradition of the successful candidate providing the celebratory lunch (shown in the above picture, as well as several photos from our new WSDL Flickr Photostream). 
• Chuck Cartledge defended his Ph.D. on May 30, 2014 (he already had a position with Fulcrum).  Since Chuck finished after Ahmed, he was responsible for lunch as well.
• Justin Brunelle passed his candidacy exam.  
• Yasmin AlNoamany passed her candidacy exam.
• Hany SalahEldeen passed his candidacy exam.
• Mohamed Aturban passed his breadth exam.
• Louis Nguyen passed his breadth exam.  
• Corren McCoy passed her breadth exam. 
• Alexander Nwala joined WSDL after completing his MS in another research group in the department.
• Shawn Jones was granted status as a PhD student even though officially he hasn't defended his MS thesis yet.

In April we introduced our now famous "PhD Crush" board that allows us to track students' progress through the various hoops they must jump through.  Although it started as sort of a joke, it's quite handy and popular -- I now wish we had instituted it long ago. 

We had 15 publications in 2014, including:

• The IJDL paper based on Martin Klein's dissertation was finally published.
• Three other IJDL papers were published -- invited, extended versions of: Yasmin's best student paper from TPDL 2013, Scott's JCDL 2013 paper nominated for best student paper, and Ahmed's TPDL 2013 paper.  
• One paper at ECIR 2014.
• One poster at SIGCSE 2014 (with WSDL alumnus Frank McCown).
• Two full papers, 1 short paper, and 1 poster from JCDL 2014 (JCDL and TPDL were combined into one conference this year).  
• Five technical reports.

JCDL was especially successful, with Justin's paper "Not all mementos are created equal: Measuring the impact of missing resources" winning "best student paper" (Daniel Hasan from UFMG also won a separate "best student paper" award), and Chuck's paper "When should I make preservation copies of myself?" winning the Vannevar Bush Best Paper award.  It is truly a great honor to have won both best paper awards at JCDL this year (pictures: Justin accepting his award, and me accepting on behalf of Chuck).  In the last two years at JCDL & TPDL, that's three best paper awards and one nomination.  The bar is being raised for future students.

In addition to the conference paper presentations, we traveled to and presented at a number of conferences that do not have formal proceedings:

• Michele Weigle presented at the 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting.
• I attended the 404/File Not Found: Link Rot, Legal Citation and Projects to Preserve Precedent workshop. 
• Yasmin AlNoamany went to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) 2014. 
• Michele Weigle and I went to the NEH ODH Project Directors Meeting.
• Mat Kelly and I went to Digital Preservation 2014.
• Justin Brunelle went to the Federal Big Data Summit and the Federal Cloud Computing Summit.  
• Shawn Jones presented at the WikiConference USA 2014.
• I presented at the 2014 IIPC General Assembly.  
• Lulwah Alkwai traveled to CRA-W 2014.

We were also fortunate enough to visit and host visitors in 2014:

• Hany SalahEldeen spent a semester at the National University of Singapore with Dr. Min-Yen Kan. 
• Yasmin AlNoamany is interning at the Internet Archive with Kristine Hannah.
• We hosted Jose Antonio Olvera from UDG for the fall 2014 semester.

We also released (or updated) a number of software packages for public use, including:

• Alexander Nwala updated the "Carbon Date" software.  
• Mat Kelly released the "Mink" Google Chrome extension. 
• Shawn Jones updated the Memento MediaWiki Extension, and created a separate, light-weight MementoHeaders MediaWiki Extension.

Our coverage in the popular press continued, with highlights including:

• I appeared on the video podcast "This Week in Law" #279 to discuss web archiving.
• I was interviewed for the German radio program "DRadio Wissen". 

We were more successful on the funding front this year, winning the following grants:

• We won two Mellon Web Archiving Incentive Awards (each of which are $22k & 9 months). 
• I received a two year, $49k grant from the IIPC for "Web Archive Profiling Via Sampling".
• We won an NEH Implementation Grant (3 years & $324k) for "Archive What I See Now: Bringing Institutional Web Archiving Tools to the Individual Researcher".  

All of this adds up to a very busy and successful 2014.  Looking ahead to 2015, as well as continued publication and funding success, we are expecting to graduate both one MS & one Ph.D. student and host another visiting researcher (Michael Herzog, Magdeburg-Stendal University). 

Thanks to everyone that made 2014 such a great success, and here's to a great start to 2015!

--Michael