Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Recent trends in digital libraries are towards integration with the architecture of the World Wide Web . The award-winning Memento Project proposes extending HTTP to provide protocol-level access to mementos (archived previous states) of web resources. Using content negotiation and other protocol operations, rather than archive-specific methods, Memento provides the digital library and preservation community with a standardized method to navigate between the original resource and its mementos. Memento Client State Chart The ODU Web Sciences and Digital Libraries Research Group has partnered with the LANL Research Library to create Memento and develop prototype Memento-compliant client and server implementations. A variety of Memento clients have been created, tested, and co-evolved along with the Memento protocol. There is now a FireFox extension , Internet Explorer browser helper object, and WebKit -based Android browser . The design and technical solutions identified during the d...

On Monday, November 16 2009 Herbert and I went to the Library of Congress and presented slides from our Memento eprint (see the previous post for a short description of Memento). On Thursday, November 19 2009 Herbert gave the same presentation at OCLC . Below are the slides that were presented as well as supporting movie. Fortunately, the slides & movie were finished in between ODU sporadically losing power over the weekend due to the Nor'easter , and on Tuesday when odusource.cs.odu.edu and mementoarchive.cs.odu.edu were brought down by a disk failure. Thanks to Scott Ainsworth and the ODU systems staff for their yeoman's work on getting everything back up and running. Slides & movie from the Library of Congress Brown Bag Seminar: Memento: Time Travel for the Web from Herbert Van de Sompel 2010-02-12 Edit: The recorded presentation has just been uploaded to the Library of Congress web site. Also, Memento has enjoyed considerable press ...

This is a follow-up to my post on October 5 , where I mentioned the availability of the Memento project web site. Herbert 's team and my team, working under an NDIIPP grant , have introduced a framework where you can browse the past web (i.e., old versions of web pages) in the same manner that you browse the current web. The framework uses HTTP content negotiation as a method for requesting the version of the page you want. Most people know little about content negotiation, and the little they think they know is often wrong (see [1-3] for more information about CN). In a nutshell, CN allows you to link to a URI "foo" but, for example, without specifying its format (e.g., "foo.html" vs. "foo.pdf") or language ("foo.html.en" vs. "foo.html.es"). Your browser automatically passes preferences to the server (e.g., "I slightly prefer HTML over PDF, and I greatly prefer English to Spanish") and the server tries to find its be...