Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

In a previous post I covered the shut down of the NASA Technical Report Server , which has since come back online in a reduced capacity .  In this post we examine some of the peculiarities of the current state of NTRS, particularly with respect to Handles and Memento.  Earlier this week I needed to access an old NASA report of mine, ironically enough about NTRS, from 1996: Richard C. Tuey, Mary Collins, Pamela Caswell, Bob Haynes, Michael L. Nelson, Jeanne Holm, Lynn Buquo, Annette Tingle, Bill Cooper and Roy Stiltner, NASAwide Electronic Publishing System-Prototype STI Electronic Document Distribution: Stage-4 Evaluation Report, NASA TM-104630 (parts 1 and 2), May 1996. It is not a particularly enjoyable report; it is the kind of lengthy, multi-authored, sanitized, bureaucratic-engineering report that people write but don't read (a "better" summary can be found in AIAA-95-0964 ).  I probably have a pdf of the report somewhere in my files, but instead I pulle...

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...

There have been a number of developments in the Memento project. Perhaps the most interesting is the release of the MementoFox Mozilla Add-on. Shown to the left is the MementoFox installed in FireFox 3.6. I went to cnn.com , then turned on MementoFox by clicking the green "(M)" logo near the top left. I used the slider bar to select a date of 2010-02-22 (red text box), some magic happened, and then I was presented with an archived version of cnn.com in the WebCite archive with an actual date of 2010-02-23 , 1 day in the future of what I requested (green text box). Entering a new date in the red text box or using the slider bar will cause MementoFox to find the closest archived copy of cnn.com, possibly in archive other than WebCite. Everyone is encouraged to go to the Memento Demos page, install MementoFox and walk through some other time traveling scenarios detailed there. It is actually quite a lot of fun to play with. Feedback is welcome on the memento-dev gr...