Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The time of year has again arrived for conferences related to our research area of web sciences and digital libraries. While much our group will be representing the university at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) conference in Indianapolis ( trip report ), I was given the opportunity to attend Digital Preservation 2013 in Alexandria, Virginia. Being much closer to home in Hampton Roads, this is the third year running that I have attended this conference ( 2012 Trip Report , 2011 Trip Report ), having presented digital preservation tools at each: Archive Facebook in 2011 and WARCreate in 2012. Following up from the recent public release of WARCreate (see the announcement ), I gave a presentation on another package I had created, Web Archiving Integration Layer (WAIL) , originally unveiled at Personal Digital Archiving 2013 in February ( Trip Report ), WARCreate, and how all of the pieces fit together titled: WARCreate and WAIL: WARC, Wayback and Heritrix Made E

The Old Dominion University Web Science and Digital Libraries (WSDL) research group was well-represented at the JCDL 2013 conference – Digital Libraries at the Crossroads . We arrived in Indianapolis, Indiana on Sunday night. While Hany SalahEldeen and I took time on Monday to ready our presentations, Scott Ainsworth and Yasmin AlNoamany presented at the Doctoral Consortium . Scott presented his research on improving temporal drift in the archives, and Yasmin presented her work on creating a story from mementos. Their presentations (and doctoral consortium) are discussed in more detail in their blog posting . Day 1 After opening remarks from J. Stephen Downie and Robert H. McDonald , Clifford Lynch gave the opening keynote of the conference entitled "Building Social Scale Information Infrastructure: Challenges of Coherence, Interoperability and Priority." Lynch posed a series of questions that are influencing the research areas in th

The JCDL 2013 Doctoral Consortium is a workshop for Ph.D. students from all over the world who are in the early phases of their dissertation work.  Students present their thesis and research plan and a panel of prominent professors and experienced practitioners in the field of Digital Libraries provides feedback in a constructive atmosphere.  Yasmin AlNaomony and Scott Ainsworth had the privilege of presenting papers at this year's Doctoral Consortium. Scott Ainsworth, Michael Nelson, & Yasmin AlNoamany User Interaction The first session focused on user interaction and was chaired by George Buchanan .  The session began with Erik Choi presenting his work on understanding the motivations behind the questions users ask in Internet Q&A forums.  Prior work in this area has focused on the use an content of Q&A forums; Erik's work focuses on why users ask questions with motivation, expectations, and the relationship between the them. Yasmin AlNaomony pres

In the third anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, president Barack Obama held a press conference and discussed the need to keep helping the Haitian community and to invest more in rebuilding the economy. A user was watching the press conference tweeted about it on the 14th of January, and provided a link to the streamed news.  A couple of days later when I read this tweet and clicked on the link and instead of seeing anything related to the press conference, Haiti, or President Obama, I got a stream feed of the Mercedes-Benz Super Dome in New Orleans in preparation for the 2013 Super Bowl. It is worth mentioning that at the time of writing this blog the tweet above was actually deleted, proving that social posts don't persist throughout time as we discussed in our earlier post . This scenario illustrates the problem we are trying to detect, model, and solve. The inconsistency between what is intended at the time of sharing and what the reader sees at the time of c

Just over a week ago , the Internet Archive upgraded their support for Memento in the Wayback Machine .  The Wayback Machine has had native Memento support for about 2.5 years, but they've just recently implemented a number of changes and now the Wayback Machine and version 08 of the Memento Internet Draft are synchronized.  The changes will be mostly unseen by casual users, but developers will appreciate the changes that should make things even simpler.  Perhaps even more importantly, these changes have been reflected in the open source version of the Wayback Machine , so the numerous sites that are running this software (for example, see the IIPC member list ) should enjoy native Memento support upon their next upgrade. The first and most significant change is that there is now just a single URI prefix for mementos ( URI-M ).  Previously, the URI-M discovered through the Wayback Machine's UI was different from the URI-M discovered through the Memento interface (e.g., us

As the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group, we regularly interact with end users as well as developers that are interested in digital preservation. One of our goals is to assist in making web preservation accessible to regular users instead of just power users.  As computer scientists, this frequently means creating software. A few digital preservation software packages that were created by WS-DLers include: Because shrimp, that's why. Warrick - a utility for reconstructing (or recovering) a website using various archives and caches. Synchronicity - a Firefox extension that supports the user in rediscovering missing web pages mcurl - a command-line memento client and two that are dear to my heart: And other sea creatures WARCreate - a Google Chrome extension that allows you to create WARC files from any webpage Web Archiving Integration Layer (WAIL) - a re-packaged Wayback and Heritrix that aims to be "One-Click User Instigated Preservatio