Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving project has started this year and is funded by the IIPC . This project will focus on the synergy between web archiving, gaming, and video game live streaming platforms. One of the goals for this project is to apply gaming concepts to web archiving. For this blog post, I will focus on the integration of web archiving and the gaming concept of speedruns . For my initial example of an archiving speedrun, I gave Brozzler and Browsertrix Crawler a set of URLs to archive and I recorded the archiving session to see which crawler would finish the set first. The set consisted of 20 URLs that were selected from a dataset that I will use for future automated livestreams. I also created a livestream script that will run two crawlers beside each other while they are archiving a set of URLs. The first speedrun round is included below. During this speedrun Browsertrix was able to reach the halfway point ( 10 URLs archived ) faster than Brozzler. Brozzler...

Trip Report for the IIPC Building Better Crawlers Hackathon in London, UK.                            On September 22-23, 2016, I attended the IIPC Building Better Crawlers Hackathon ( #iipchack ) at the British Library in London, UK. Having been to London almost exactly 2 years ago for the Digital Libraries 2014 conference , I was excited to go back, but was more so anticipating collaborating with some folks I had long been in contact with during my tenure as a PhD student researcher at ODU. The event was a well-organized yet loosely scheduled meeting that resembled more of an "Unconference" than a Hackathon in that the discussion topics were defined as the event progressed rather than a larger portion being devoted to implementation (see the recent Archives Unleashed 1.0 and 2.0 trip reports ). The represented organizations were: British Libr...