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:
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:
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:
We were also fortunate enough to visit and host visitors in 2014:
We also released (or updated) a number of software packages for public use, including:
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:
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





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