Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On July 20-22, I was at the NDIIPP Partners Meeting in Arlington VA, along with Martin Klein and Michele Weigle . The Library of Congress has not yet uploaded a public summary of the meeting, but there were a number of interesting additions to previous NDIIPP Partners Meetings (edit: the meeting slides are now available). First, there were keynotes from both the Librarian of Congress , James Billington , as well as the Archivist of the United States , David Ferriero . There was also a ceremony to commemorate the charter members (which includes ODU CS ) of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA). I don't think the NDSA has a canonical web site yet, so the iPRES 2009 paper by Anderson, Gallinger & Potter is probably the best available description (edit: LC has announced a NDSA web site ). There was a theme of exploring the questions about "why we should care about digital preservation". The Library of Congress debuted this video, now available on th

The Library of Congress funded research project " Tools for a Preservation Ready Web " is coming to a close. The initial phase (2007-2008) of the project funded Joan Smith 's PhD research into using the web server to inform web crawlers exactly how many valid URIs there are at a web site (the "counting problem") as well as perform server-side generation of preservation metadata at dissemination time (the "representation problem"). Several interesting papers came out of that project (e.g., WIDM 2006 , D-Lib 14(1/2) ) as well as the mod_oai Apache module. Joan graduated in 2008 and is now the Chief Technology Strategist for the Emory University Libraries and an adjunct faculty member in the CS department at Emory. Since that time, Herbert and I (plus our respective teams) have been closing out this project working on some further ideas regarding the preservation of web pages and how web archives can be integrated with the "live web".

On June 24-26 I attended the 2009 NDIIPP Partners Meeting in Washington DC. Although it has grown from the early years, I believe this year's attendance of 150 people is similar to last year's. Clay Shirky , author of "Here Comes Everybody", gave the keynote on Wednesday morning. Hopefully the Library of Congress will post a video of the keynote soon. If not, take a look at some of his other presentations -- you will find them enjoyable and informative. On Thursday morning I presented a summary of Martin 's PhD research, the tangible product of which will be a FireFox extension called "Synchronicity": Synchronicity: Just-In-Time Discovery of Lost Web Pages from Michael Nelson The presentation was very well received and there is a lot of interest in the extension. There were several interesting break out sessions, but the real news was on Friday when Martha Anderson (LC) introduced the upcoming National Digital Stewardship Alliance