Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

"Some doctors prescribe application of sandalwood paste to remedy headache, but making the paste and applying it is no less of a headache." -- an Urdu proverb This is the translation of a couplet from an Urdu poem which is often used as a proverb. This couplet nicely reflects my feeling when Vinay Goel from the Internet Archive was demonstrating how suitable ArchiveSpark was for our IMLS Museums data analysis during the  Archives Unleashed 2.0 Datathon , in the Library of Congress, Washington DC on June 14, 2016. ArchiveSpark allows easy data extraction, derivation, and analysis from standard web archive files (such as CDX and WARC). On the back of my head I was thinking, it seems nice, cool, and awesome to use ArchiveSpark (or Warcbase ) for the task, and certainly a good idea for serious archive data analysis, but perhaps an overkill for a two day hackathon event. Installing and configuring these tools would have required us to setup a Hadoop cluster, Jupyter ...

Traditionally,  Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) has hosted a workshop session called Doctoral Consortium (DC) specific to PhD students of digital library research field and this year (JCDL 2016) was no exception. The workshop was intended for students that are in the early stages of their dissertation work. Several WS-DL group members attended and reported past DC workshops and this time it was my turn. This year's doctoral consortium (June 19, 2016) was chaired by  George Buchanan ,  J. Stephen Downie , and  Uma Murthy . Committee members included  Sally Jo Cunningham ,  Michael Nelson ,  Martin Klein , and  Edie Rasmussen . A total of six PhD students participated in the workshop and presented their work. The doctoral consortium session is generally not open for public participation, however,  Michele C. Weigle (JCDL 2016 program chair), Mat Kelly ( last year's DC participant), and Alexandar Nwala (potential ...

Trip Report for the Web Archiving and Digital Libraries Workshop 2016 in Newark, NJ.                            Following our recent trip to the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) , WS-DL attempted the Web Archiving and Digital Libraries (WADL) Workshop ( #wadl2016 ) (see 2015 and 2013 reports) co-located with the conference in Newark, New Jersey. This post documents the presentations and our take-home from the workshop. On Wednesday, June 22, 2016 at around 2pm, Ed Fox of Virginia Tech welcomed the crowd of 30+ librarians, researchers, and archivists into the two half-day event by first introducing Vinay Goel ( @vinaygo ) of Internet Archive (IA) to lead the panel of "Worldwide Activities on Web Archiving". Vinay described the recent efforts by IA to make the archives more accessible through additional interfaces to the a...

Good morning Newark! Beautiful start for the doctoral consortium and tutorials at #jcdl2016 pic.twitter.com/kEBdJtvIho — Michele Weigle (@weiglemc) June 19, 2016 The ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries ( JCDL ) is a major international conference that offers the opportunity to address technical, practical, and social issues associated with digital libraries. This annual conference was held at the Paul Robeson Campus Center, Rutgers University Newark, New Jersey, between June 19-23, 2016. Here is a list of the accepted papers  and posters/demos . The theme for this year's conference was Big Libraries, Big Data, Big Innovation. Computer/Information scientists, Librarians, Archivists, Social scientists, Historians and other participants from around the world and other disciples involved in digital library research and practice presented papers and posters, specialized workshops ( see Mat's blog post about the WADL workshop ), tuto...