Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

 On March 21 & 22 members of the ResourceSync technical group met in Ann Arbor Michigan to work the 0.5 version of the ResourceSync specification .  In case you're not familiar, ResourceSync is a framework, intended to replace OAI-PMH , for specifying how a destination ("harvester" in PMH terms) can synchronize the web resources of a source ("repository" in PMH terms).  The source publishes a list of resources that it makes available via ResourceSync (which may be a subset of valid resources at the web site) using Sitemaps , with the idea that if you're already using Sitemaps then you are already minimally compliant, and the more advanced features of ResourceSync also use the Sitemap syntax for consistency.  Although the syntactic details are in flux, Herbert's presentation at the September 2012 NISO Forum is a good introduction the framework, as are the two recent D-Lib Magazine articles ( Sept/Oct 2012 and Jan/Feb 2013 ).  Some important

At the ResourceSync meeting this week, Simeon Warner brought my attention to the fact that the NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) digital library had gone offline on March 19.  Although I have not been involved with it since about 2004, I was the creator of NTRS and it was a central part of my early career .  If you click on http://ntrs.nasa.gov/ now, you can a message saying the service is down.  Technically, you get an "HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" message: $ curl -I http://ntrs.nasa.gov/ HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2013 04:00:14 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) Last-Modified: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:50:02 GMT ETag: "720003-300-4d882e4c05280" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 768 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8  And the body of the page says: The NASA technical reports server will be unavailable for public access while the agency conducts a review of the site's conten

The NFL salary cap for 2013 has been calculated to be about $123 million. All NFL teams must be in compliance with the salary cap by March 12th when the new league year starts. March 12th also marks the start of the free agent market in the NFL. Teams that are over the salary cap must let some players go and teams that are under the salary cap are looking to add new players to their rosters. The process sounds simple on the surface but in reality it becomes confusing rather quickly. Many teams routinely exceed the salary cap by manipulating contracts. The Pittsburgh Steelers were about $14 million over the cap until they modified Ben Roethlisberger's contract and changed most of his pay into a signing bonus. Signing bonuses can be amortized over the life of a contract. Instead of receiving an $18 million dollar salary, the player gets a $2 million dollar salary and a $16 million dollar bonus. The bonus will be divided by the number of years in the contract and thus reduce the i