2023-01-25: International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL) 2022 Trip Report


The
International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL), like JCDL (JCDL 2022 Trip Report) and TPDL (TPDL 2022 Trip Report), connects digital libraries, computer science, and library and information science communities. This year, the 24th ICADL was held from November 30th to December 2nd, 2022, in Hanoi, Vietnam, as an onsite in-person conference. The presenters who could not attend could present their papers online and join sessions. Our Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group (@WebSciDL) from Old Dominion University had three presentations at ICADL from current and former group members. We presented our research online through Zoom since we could not attend in person. I could only cover two sessions as I was unwell, and the conference was held at Hanoi time (UTC+7) which is 12 hours ahead of Eastern Time (UTC-5). In this blog, I’ll summarize Session B-1 (Data Archive & Management 2), which comprises the three presentations from the WSDL group, and Session C-1 (Cultural Data Collection and Analysis).


Data Archive & Management (Session B-1) 

The session was held on Day 1 on November 30th, 2022, and chaired by Takahiro Komamizu from Nagoya University. You can view the recording of this session online.

  1. Aggregator Reuse and Extension for Richer Web Archive Interaction

Dr. Mat Kelly from Drexel University, also a WS-DL alumnus, presented the first talk of the session, titled "Aggregator Reuse and Extension for Richer Web Archive Interaction.” Memento aggregators let users query through numerous web archives for mementos/captures of a particular URI. This paper discusses two types of memento aggregators: server-side aggregators (Time Travel) and user-deployable aggregators (MemGator). In this work,  Mat describes the state-of-the-art Memento aggregation, abstracts its processes, discusses its limitations, and suggests systematic improvements. Mat discussed that Memento aggregators could be extended for richer interaction with web archives and enable a client to express more in the process. 



  1. Caching HTTP 404 Responses Eliminates Unnecessary Archival Replay Requests

I, Kritika Garg from WS-DL, Old Dominion University, presented our work titled “Caching HTTP 404 Responses Eliminates Unnecessary Archival Replay Requests.” We demonstrated how some archived web pages generate recurring wasteful requests during archival replay. For instance, we showed a memento making 1098 requests per minute. We discussed several types of archived web pages that are more likely to make recurring requests to the web archive server, such as pages with image carousels, banners, widgets, etc. We also showed the web pages that poll the server periodically for regular/live updates (like sports scores updates, news updates, social media feeds, etc.) are likely to generate recurring requests. Web archives that try to patch 404s from the live web may cause even more unnecessary traffic to the web archive. These recurring requests could cause a potential security issue, such as denial of service. We created a minimal reproducible example to show how missing embedded resources make recurring requests to the web archive server. We demonstrated that we could mitigate unnecessary requests by sending a Cache-Control response header with the HTTP 404 responses.




  1. Web Archiving as Entertainment

Travis Reid from WS-DL, Old Dominion University, presented his short paper titled “Web Archiving as Entertainment” This work aims to make web archiving more entertaining by combining it with gaming. This work introduces archiving as a live gaming stream allowing users to enjoy it as a spectator sport. They applied the speedrun gaming concept to the web archiving process. For instance, Travis presented a web archiving live stream as a contest where two crawlers compete to archive a set of seed URIs. He created demos of two video games: Gun Mayhem 2 and NFL Challenge.


  1. Documenting Architectural Styles using CIDOC CRM

Michail Agathos from the Department of Archives, Library Science and Museology, Ionian University, presented the last session talk titled “Documenting Architectural Styles using CIDOC CRM.” His work emphasizes the importance of documenting cultural heritage information. He talked about the notion of architectural style and the previous work on documenting architecture. Their work provides a framework for using CIDOC CRM and its extensions to document architectural styles. CIDOC CRM offers a reference model and information standard that cultural heritage institutions can use to represent their collections and associated entities to facilitate information sharing. 




Day 2: Cultural Data Collection and Analysis (Session C-1) 

The session was held on Day 2 on December 1st, 2022, and chaired by Adam Jatowt from the University of Innsbruck. You can view the recording of this session online.


  1. Differences Between the Structure of Research Projects in Computer Science Funded by Japanese and American Agencies

Emi Ishita from the Department of Library Science, Kyushu University, presented the first talk of the session, titled “Differences Between the Structure of Research Projects in Computer Science Funded by Japanese and American Agencies” Their work aims to improve policy-making and research by understanding the relationship between funding agencies’ expectations and researchers’ activities. They investigate how research project size (e.g., number of authors), international collaboration, and popular publications from funded projects in Japan and the USA have progressed over the years (2011-2020). Their results show an increase in the number of projects funded by the National Science Foundation and international collaborations with China.


  1. Opening access for digital collections: the state of cultural materials in Indonesian Higher Education institutions

Widiatmoko Adi Putranto from the Department of Library Science, Kyushu University, presented a work titled “Opening access for digital collections: the state of cultural materials in Indonesian Higher Education institutions.” Their work examines the accessibility of digitized cultural heritage materials at Indonesian higher education (HE) institutions to users. Their research questions whether the HE institutions hold cultural heritage materials and how much of these materials are digitally accessible and open. They observed the presence of cultural heritage collections and the state of accessibility on the university library’s websites for 8 Indonesian HE institutions. He also talks about formulating policies for sensitive material to prevent copyright issues. Their work aims to raise awareness of the importance of opening access to cultural heritage collections. 


  1. A Comparison of Information Retrieval Pre-processing Algorithms applied to African Historical Data

Hussein Suleman from the Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, presented work titled “A Comparison of Information Retrieval Pre-processing Algorithms applied to African Historical Data.”  African historical data includes contemporary and possibly biased datasets produced by colonial administrators or archivists far from the source of the data, which presents unique challenges for the information retrieval algorithms used to search through them. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the effect of standard text and image pre-processing algorithms on the quality of search results when users search through a current African historical data collection. In terms of recall, precision, and NDCG, nine standard algorithms were compared. 


  1. Using Archivematica and Omeka S for Long-term Preservation and Access of Digitized Archive Materials 

Boyoung Kim from the University of Tokyo presented the last talk of this session on “Using Archivematica and Omeka S for Long-term Preservation and Access of Digitized Archive Materials.” She presented a workflow for the long-term preservation and access of digitized archival materials. Their workflow consists of three stages. They first analyze the metadata based on the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. Archivematica is used to create information packages for preservation. At last, they developed an original tool for metadata interoperability between Archivematica and Omeka S to establish a consistent workflow for digitized materials.


Conclusion

Congratulations to the organizers, chairs, and participants for the successful ICADL 2022 conference. It was a great experience to participate in the ICADL 2022. It was exciting to put forth my research work and attend to the significant research in the digital library field. Hopefully, we will attend the conference in person and cover more sessions next year. All papers and recordings of the ICADL 2022 are available online.



-- Kritika Garg(@kritika_garg)






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