Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Many web services such as  archive.is ,  Archive-It ,  Internet Archive , and  UK Web Archive  have provided archived web pages or mementos  for us to use. Nowadays, the web archivists have shifted their focus from how to make a good archive to measuring how well the archive preserved the page. It raises a question about how to objectively measure the damage of a memento that can correctly emulate user (human) perception. Related to this,  Justin Brunelle  devised a prototype for measuring the impact of missing embedded resources (the damage) on a web page. Brunelle, in his IJDL paper (and the earlier JCDL version), describes that the quality of a memento depends on the availability of its resources. The straight percentage of missing resources in a memento is not always a good indicator of how "damaged" it is. For example, one page could be missing several small icons whose absence users never even notice, and a second page could be missing a single embedd

At the Internet Archive, it was rainy in San Francisco, but that did not deter those of us attending Dodging the Memory Hole 2017 . We engaged in discussions about a very important topic: the preservation of online news content. An attendee listens to a presentation at the @RJI Dodging the Memory Hole conference in San Francisco. #DTMH2017 pic.twitter.com/2ajM1k06Ru — RJI Futures Lab (@RJIFuturesLab) November 16, 2017 Keynote: Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian for the Internet Archive "Let's become a library. Let's be useful to society to understand ourselves." ― @brewster_kahle #DTMH2017 pic.twitter.com/rg7hMqWBdI — JDNA (@RJIJDNA) November 15, 2017 Brewster Kahle is well known in digital preservation and especially web archiving circles. He founded the Internet Archive in May 1996 . The WS-DL and LANL's Prototyping Team collaborate heavily with those from the Internet Archive, so hearing his talk was quite inspirational.

While researching my dissertation topic, I re-encountered the paper, " Routing Memento Requests Using Binary Classifiers " by Bornand, Balakireva, and Van de Sompel from JCDL 2016 ( arXiv:1606.09136v1 ). The high-level gist of this paper is that by using two corpora of URI-Rs consisting of requests to their Memento aggregator (one for training, the other for training evaluation), the authors were able to significantly mitigate wasted requests to archives that contained no mementos for a requested URI-R. For each of the 17 Web archives included in the experiment, with the exception of the Internet Archive on the assumption that a positive result would always be returned, a classifier was generated. The classifiers informed the decision of, given a URI-R, whether the respective Web archive should be queried. Optimization of this sort has been performed before. For example, AlSum et al. from TPDL 2013 ( trip report , IJDL 2014 , and arXiv ) created profiles for 12 Web a

The crowds descended upon Arlington, Virginia for the 80th annual meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology . I attended this meeting to learn more about ASIS&T , including its special interest groups . Also attending with me was former ODU Computer Science student and current Los Alamos National Laboratory librarian Valentina Neblitt-Jones . Shawn and Valentina - ODU and Los Alamos National Lab #asist2017 pic.twitter.com/0hf6qvM5js — Valentina (@vneblitt) November 1, 2017 The ASIS&T team had organized a wonderful collection of panels, papers, and other activities for us to engage in. Plenary Speakers Richard Marks: Head of the PlayStation Magic Lab at Sony Interactive Entertainment Richard Marks talked about the importance of play to the human experience. He covered innovations at the Playstation Magic Lab in an effort to highlight possible futures of human-computer interaction. The goal of the laboratory is "experience engin