Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

In my wallet I have a few ₹500 Indian currency notes that say, "I PROMISE TO PAY THE BEARER THE SUM OF FIVE HUNDRED RUPEES" followed by the signature of the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India . However, this promise was broken two years ago from today, since then these bills in my pocket are nothing more than rectangular pieces of printed paper. So, I decided to utilize my origami skills and turn them into butterflies. On November 8, 2016, at 8:00 PM (Indian Standard Time), Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the demonetization (effective in four hours after midnight) of the two biggest currency notes (₹1,000 and ₹500) in circulation at that time. Together these two notes represented about 86% of the total cash economy of India at that time. More than 65% of the Indian population still lives in rural and remote areas where availability of electricity, the Internet, and other utilities is not reliable yet. Hence, cash is a very common means of business...

On March 29-30, 2017 I attended Personal Digital Archiving Conference 2017 ( #pda2017 ) held at Stanford University in sunny Palo Alto, California. Other members of the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group (WS-DL) had previously attended this conference (see their 2013 , 2012 , and 2011 trip reports) and from their rave reviews of previous year's conferences, I was looking forward to it. I also just happened to be presenting and demoing the Web Archiving Integration Layer (WAIL) there as an added bonus. Day 1 Day one started off at 9am with Gary Wolf giving the first keynote on Quantified Self Archives . Quantified Self Archives are comprised of data generated from health monitoring tools such as the FitBit or life blogging data which is used to gain in sites into your own life through data visualization.  Gary Wolf kicking off #pda2017 . pic.twitter.com/X3pUOEddNs — John Berlin (@johnaberlin) March 29, 2017 @agaricus ...

For its third consecutive year, the Personal Digital Archiving conference took place at Internet Archive in San Francisco , CA. Ahmed and I attended a diverse range of fascinating sessions on how people think about creating and preserving personal digital archives. The environment was very nice, and friendly (there were a baby and a dog in the second day ^_^). The conference was held on Feb. 24 and Feb. 25, 2012. The first day started at 9:00 am with a keynote and welcome intro by Brewster Kahle about the Internet Archive and personal archives. Brewster gave a quick intro about Internet Archive history and asked an important question, “what would we want out of the Internet Archive in terms of preserving stuff that individuals are creating?”, which should be solved by knowing how to collect materials and make them useful for the people from this conference. Mike Ashenfelder from the Library of Congress gave a talk entitled “Personal Digital Archive Advice for the General Publ...