Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

I am pleased to report on the successful completion of my Master's Degree thesis entitled "An Extensible Framework for Creating Personal Archives of Web Resources Requiring Authentication". The problem that I hoped to resolve with the study was one that plagues software like Archive Facebook , even to this day, in that when the hierarchy a social media website changes, tools created to preserve content on those sites tend to break. By conforming these tools to a specification that is setup to represent the hierarchy of the target social media websites, these tools become adaptive without the need of continuous maintenance on the part of the developer. Also in the study was an exploration and enumeration of various aspects of personal web archiving that prevent the field from taking advantage of the tools, procedures and mediums that are widely used in conventional web archiving. In addition to simply identifying the problem, I also created a Google Chrome extension, W

Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service, provided by the Internet Archive , that allows institutions and users to create, maintain, and view digital collections of web resources. The current interface of Archive-It is largely text-based, supporting drill-down navigation using lists of URIs. While this interface provides good searching capabilities, it is not very efficient for browsing. This was our motivation for thinking about new visualizations to make it easy for users to browse Archive-It collections. This work, "Visualizing Digital Collections at Archive-It", was the subject of a recent MS thesis by Kalpesh Padia (who is continuing his Ph.D. studies at NC State University ) and a JCDL 2012 short paper by Kalpesh Padia, Yasmin AlNoamany , and Michele C. Weigle . In order to provide a better visual experience to users of Archive-It collections, we implemented six different visualizations (treemap, time cloud, bubble chart, image plot, timeline, and wo