Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On June 16, 2016, the Library of Congress hosted a one day Symposium entitled  Saving the Web: The Ethics and Challenges of Preserving What's on the Internet . The Symposium came at the end of the  Archives Unleashed  2.0 Web Archive Datathon. The Datathon itself is covered in an earlier report . In addition to presenting the results of datathon projects, the wide variety of speakers at the symposium defended the need for preservation, discussed the special issues associated with preservation of data, and finally highlighted the importance and concepts surrounding the preservation of multimedia. Keynote by Vint Cerf The symposium opened with Dame Wendy Hall , Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton and Kluge Chair in Science and Technology at the Library of Congress . She mentioned that the Internet has only been available for a few decades and we need to preserve its openness and freedom, because that openness and freedom are always in per...

Don't you just love reading BuzzFeed -like articles, constructed solely of content embedded from external sources?  Yeah, me neither.  But I'm going to pull one together anyway. Vint Cerf generated a lot of buzz last week when at an AAAS meeting he gave talk titled " Digital Vellum ".  The AAAS version, to the best of my knowledge, is not online but this version of "Digital Vellum" at CMU-SV from earlier the same week is probably the same. The media (e.g., The Guardian , The Atlantic , BBC ) picked up on it, because when Vint Cerf speaks people rightly pay attention.  However, the reaction from archiving practitioners and researchers was akin to having your favorite uncle forget your birthday, mostly because Cerf's talk seemed to ignore the last 20 or so years of work in preservation.  For a thoughtful discussion of Cerf's talk, I recommend David Rosenthal's blog post .  But let's get to the BuzzFeed part... In the wake of the med...