Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

After exploring London on Sunday, I attended the first DL2014 session: the Doctoral Consortium. Held in the College Building at the City University London , the Doctoral Consortium offered early-career Ph.D. students the opportunity to present their research and academic plans and receive feedback from digital libraries professors and researchers. Edie Rasmussen chaired the Doctoral Consortium. I was a presenter at the Doctoral Consortium in 2012 with Hany SalahEldeen , but I attended this year as a Ph.D. student observer. Session I: User Interaction was chaired by Jos é Borbinha . Hugo Huurdeman was first to present his work entitled "Adaptive Search Systems for Web archive research". His work focuses on information retrieval and discovery in the archives. He explained the challenge with searching not only across documents but also across time. Georgina Hibberd presented her work entitled "Metaphors for discovery: how interfaces shape our relationship with

In preparation for the upcoming " Tools and Techniques for Revisiting Online Scholarly Content " tutorial at JCDL 2014 , Herbert and I have revamped the canonical slide deck for Memento , and have called it " Memento 101 " for the 101 slides it contains.  The previous slide deck was from May 2011 and was no longer current with the RFC (December 2013).  The slides cover Memento basic and intermediate concepts, with pointers for some of the more detailed and esoteric bits (like patterns 2 , 3 , and 4 , as well as the special cases ) of interest to only the most hard-core archive wonks.  The JCDL 2014 tutorial will choose a subset of these slides, combined with updates from the Hiberlink project and various demos.  If you find yourself in need of explaining Memento please feel free to use these slides in part or in whole (PPT is available for download from slideshare).  Memento 101 from Herbert Van de Sompel --Michael & Herbert

One very large part of digital preservation is the act of crawling and saving pages on the live Web into a format for future generations to view. To accomplish this, web archivists use various crawlers, tools, and bits of software, often built to purpose. Because of these tools' ad hoc functionality, users expect them to function much better than a general purpose tool. As anyone that has looked up a complex web page in The Archive can tell you, the more complex the page, the less likely that all resources will be captured to replay the page. Even when these pages are preserved, the replay experience is frequently inconsistent from the page on the live web. We have started building a preliminary corpus of tests to evaluate a handful of tools and web sites that were created specifically to save web pages from being lost in time. In homage to the web browser evaluation websites by the Web Standards Project , we have created The Archival Acid Test as a first step in ensuring

I attended the 2013 Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) Conference on September 22-26 in Valletta, Malta .  Although I've had papers at several of the prior TPDL (known as ECDL prior to 2011) conferences , I think this is the first one I've personally attended since ECDL 2005 in Austria.  Normally I prefer to send students to present their papers, but this year we had five full papers accepted, so I could not afford to send all the students and I went in their stead.  An unfortunate side effect of having so many papers is that between preparation and my own presentations I was unable to see as much of the conference as I would have liked. The conference began with Herbert Van de Sompel and I giving a tutorial about ResourceSync .  Attendees registered for all tutorials and were free to attend whichever one they preferred.  We had as many as ten people in ours at one point, but more importantly we had some key people present who will be implementing Resource

It all started last April, particularly on the 9th, when I received an email from the Dr. George Buchanan delivering the good news, my paper have been accepted at the annual international conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries TPDL 2012 . Being the Program Chair, Dr. Buchanan sent me the reviews and feedback associated with my paper which was entitled “ Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost? ” which paved the way in the following months for the preparation process to present this paper.   Along with submitting the paper, Dr. Nelson gave me the permission to submit my PhD proposal to be considered for the Doctoral Consortium at the conference. Scoring my second goal, Dr. Birger Larsen and Dr. Stefan Gradmann sent me a delightful email announcing the committee's acceptance to my proposal and I was invited a day before the conference to present my work at the consortium. The Hat-trick came a few weeks before