Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

After a long hiatus, the Warrick tool has been resurrected with some modifications. Warrick is a free utility for reconstructing (or recovering) a website. The original version of Warrick discovered archived versions of resources by searching the Web Infrastructure (which includes search engine caches and the Internet Archive ) for archived versions of web resources. It would automatically download and organize the best versions of the archived resources and package them into a copy of the deleted site. As discussed by Warrick's creator, Frank McCown , the original version of Warrick was prone to breaking due to frequent changes to search engine APIs and archive URLs . Warrick 2.0, adapted from Dr. McCown's original code by Justin F. Brunelle , interfaces with the Memento framework via the mcurl program (developed by Ahmed AlSum ). By incorporating Memento timemaps, Warrick no longer has the responsibility of directly searching and communicating with the caches and archive...

Old Dominion University has a freshmen computer science course that focuses on what it means to be a computer scientist. This course discusses career opportunities, current research being performed, and serves to debunk myths and misconceptions about the field of computer science. Such myths include: we never talk to humans, we code our entire lives away, and we are nocturnal. I was invited to be a guest lecturer for the class last night. Even though the last myth is sometimes true, I did my best to touch on each of these talking points during the presentation embedded below. Day in the Life of a Computer Scientist from Justin Brunelle The first topics I spoke about in the presentation generated the majority of questions and discussion. I spoke first about the digital preservation work being performed in the WS-DL group at ODU. This, of course, included discussing the ArchiveFacebok , Warrick , and Memento projects at a cursory level. During our discussion, we hit on th...

The article " Why Websites Are Lost (and How They're Sometimes Found) " has finally been published in the November 2009 issue of Communications of the ACM . Co-written with Frank McCown and Cathy Marshall , it was accepted for publication in the fall of 2007. Although we've had a pre-print available since 2008, it just isn't the same until you see it in print. Except we won't be seeing this in print; it is instead published in the "Virtual Extension" part of the CACM. So even though it has page numbers (pp. 141-145), this article won't be among those that arrive in your mailbox in a few weeks. As someone who has spent his entire career trying to transform the scholarly communication process with the web and digital libraries I completely understand this move by the CACM, but I have to admit I'm disappointed that I won't see a printed, bound copy. Even though in the long-term, all discovery will come from the web (e.g., Google Scho...