Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Last week LANL released Memento for Chrome , an extension that adds Memento capability for Chrome browsers.  It represents such a leap in capability and speed that the prior MementoFox (Memento for FireFox) add-on should be considered deprecated.  It's not just a FireFox vs. Chrome thing either; Memento for Chrome features a subtle change in how it interacts with the past and present.  MementoFox had a toggle switch for present vs. Time Travel mode that would trap and modify all outbound requests , from the current page and all subsequent pages until turned off, to go from the form of: http://example.com/index.html to: http://mementoproxy.lanl.gov/aggr/timegate/http://example.com/index.html This involved some complicated logic to determine when you were getting a memento (i.e., archived web entity) vs. something from the live web.  When you factored in native Memento archives vs. proxied Memento archives, things could get hairy (see the 2011 Code4Lib paper for a (dat

Image provided from  http://www.taxhelpattorney.com/ In our current research, the WS-DL group has observed leakage in archived sites. Leakage occurs when archived resources include current content. I enjoy referring to such occurrences as "zombie" resources (which is appropriate given the upcoming Halloween holiday). That is to say, these resources are expected to be archived ("dead") but still reach into the current Web. In the examples below, this reach into the live Web is caused by URIs contained in JavaScript not being rewritten to be relative to the Web archive; the page in the archive is not pulling from the past archived content but is "reaching out" (zombie-style) from the archive to the live Web.  We provide two examples with humorous juxtaposition of past and present content. Because of  JavaScript, rendering a page from the past will include advertisements from the present Web. 2008 memento of cnn.com f

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 th