Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Great writeup of #jcdl2017 in Toronto by @acnwala , featuring @oducs @WebSciDL (2 faculty, 2 alums, 3 grad students) https://t.co/wSirB8Jhq9 pic.twitter.com/HM0XePiz8u — ODU Computer Science (@oducs) July 28, 2017 . @WebSciDL luncheon, joint w/ Dr Li's group and several prospective students. pic.twitter.com/uvgDpHmPWc — Michael L. Nelson (@phonedude_mln) February 10, 2017 The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group had a steady 2017, with one MS student graduated, one research grant awarded ($75k), 10 publications, and 15 trips to conferences, workshops, hackathons, internships, etc.  In the last four years (2016--2013) we have graduated five PhD and three MS students, so the focus for this year was "recruiting" and we did pick up seven new students: three PhD and four MS.  We had so many new and prospective students that Dr. Weigle and I created a new CS 891 web archiving seminar to indoctrinate introduce them to web archiving and graduate schoo...

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 pag...

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...

Mat Kelly reports on the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Web Archiving Conference (WAC) 2017 in London, England.                             In the latter part of Web Archiving Week ( #waweek2017 ) from Wednesday to Friday, Sawood and I attended the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Web Archiving Conference (WAC) 2017 , held jointly with the RESAW Conference at the Senate House and British Library Knowledge Center in London. Each of the three days had multiple tracks. Reported here are the presentations I attended. Prior to the keynote, Jane Winters ( @jfwinters ) of University of London and Nicholas Taylor ( @nullhandle ) welcomed the crowd with admiration toward the Senate House venue. Leah Lievrouw ( @Leah53 ) from UCLA then began the keynote. In her talk, she walked through the evolution of the Int...