Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Introduction As web archives have advanced over time, their ability to capture and playback web content has grown. The Memento Protocol, defined in RFC 7089 , defines an HTTP protocol extension that bridges the present and past web by allowing time-based content negotiation. Now that Memento is operational at many web archives, analysis of archive content is simplified. Over the past several years, I have conducted analysis of web archive temporal coherence. Some of the results of this analysis will be published at Hypertext'15 . This blog post discusses one implication of the research: the benefits achieved when web archives playback original headers. Archive Headers and Original Headers Consider the headers (Figure 1) returned for a logo from the ODU Computer Science Home Page as archived on Wed, 29 Apr 2015 15:15:23 GMT. HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: image/gif Last-Modified: Wed, 29 Apr 2015 15:15:23 GMT Figure 1. No Original Header Playback Try to answer the

On Wednesday, August 5, 2015 Herbert Van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory) will give a colloquium in the ODU Computer Science Department entitled "A Perspective on Archiving the Scholarly Web".  It will be held in the third floor E&CS conference room (r. 3316) at 11am.  Space is somewhat limited (the first floor auditorium is being renovated), but all are welcome to attend.  The abstract for his talk is:  A Perspective on Archiving the Scholarly Web As the scholarly communication system evolves to become natively web-based and starts supporting the communication of a wide variety of objects, the manner in which its essential functions -- registration, certification, awareness, archiving -- are fulfilled co-evolves.  Illustrations of the changing implementation of these functions will be used to arrive at a high-level characterization of a future scholarly communication system and of the objects that will be communicated. The focus will then shift to the fu

Inspired by the " #icanhazpdf "  movement   and built upon the Memento   service,  I Can Haz Memento  attempts to expand the awareness of  Web Archiving  through  Twitter . Given a URL (for a page) in a tweet with the hash tag " #icanhazmemento ," the I Can Haz Memento service replies the tweet with a link pointing to an archived version of the page closest to the time of the tweet. The consequence of this is: the archived version closest to the time of the tweet likely expresses the intent of the user at the time the link was shared. Consider a scenario where Jane shares a link in a tweet to the front page of  cnn  about a story on healthcare. Given the fluid nature of the news cycle, at some point, the story about healthcare would be replaced by another fresh story; thus the link in Jane's tweet and its corresponding intent (healthcare story) become misrepresented by Jane's original link (for the new story). This is where I Can Haz Memento comes i

Large, Dynamic and Ubiquitous –The Era of the Digital Library JCDL 2015 ( #JCDL2015 ) took place at the University of Tennessee Conference Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. The conference was four days long; June 21-25, 2015. This year three students from our WS-DL CS group at ODU  had their papers accepted as well as one poster (see trip reports for 2014, 2013 , 2012 , 2011 ). Dr. Weigle ( @weiglemc ), Dr. Nelson ( @phonedude_mln ), Sawood Alam ( @ibnesayeed ), Mat Kelly ( @machawk1 ) and I ( @LulwahMA ) went to the conference. We drove from Norfolk, VA. Four of our previous members of our group, Martin Klein (UCLA, CA) ( @mart1nkle1n ), Joan Smith (Linear B Systems, inc., VA) ( @joansm1th ), Ahmed Alsum (Stanford University, CA) ( @aalsum ) and Hany SalahEldeen (Microsoft, Seattle)( @hanysalaheldeen ), also met us there. The trip was around 8 hours. We enjoyed the mountain views and the beautiful farms. We also caught parts of a storm on our way, but it only lasted for two

Mat Kelly attended and presented at the JCDL 2015 Doctoral Consortium. This is his report.                            Evaluating progress between milestones in a PhD program is difficult due to the inherent open-endedness of research. A means of evaluating whether a student's topic is sound and has merit while still early on in his career is to attend a doctoral consortium. Such an event, as the one held at the annual Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) , has previously provided a platform for WS-DL students (see 2014 , 2013 , 2012 , and others ) to network with faculty and researchers from other institutions as well as observe the approach that other PhD students at the same point in their career use to explain their respective topics. As the wheels have turned, I have showed enough progress in my research for it to be suitable for preliminary presentation at the 2015 JCDL Doctoral Consortium -- so did so this past Sunday in Knoxville, Tennessee. Along with seven