Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

9°C & wind 0 m/s! Our host @Landsbokasafn & @kristsi seem to have booked an early spring for #iipcga16 . Thank you! pic.twitter.com/jvyORkzsRo — IIPC (@NetPreserve) April 12, 2016 Our host @kristsi opening #iipcGA16 pic.twitter.com/YEWPnJPIRI — IIPC (@NetPreserve) April 11, 2016 The 2016 IIPC General Assembly and the separate-but-related IIPC Web Archiving Conference 2016 were held in Reykjavík, Iceland, April 11-15, with the former being open to IIPC members only and the latter open to the public.  Unfortunately, my trip report will be incomplete since I had to leave midday on Wednesday.  The first day was primarily given to IIPC business: introducing the new officers, covering project status, budgets, new bylaws , etc.   Jason gave a brief overview of our IIPC-funded Web Archive Profiling Via Sampling Project , which is now coming to a close.  In addition to the resources and deliverables linked from the IIPC project page, Sawood Alam has developed the Me

The CNI Spring 2016 Members Meeting was held in San Antonio, TX, April 4-5, 2016.  As usual, the presentations were excellent but with six or more simultaneous sessions you are forced to make hard choices about what to catch up on. This year Martin Halbert and Katherine Skinner arranged the " Digital Preservation of Federal Information Summit ", convening 30+ people to discuss "...the topic of preservation and access to at-risk digital government information."  It was quite the collaborative exercise, and I know Martin produced some summary slides that I will link here when they are posted.  There were only a few presentations (and they were done in Pecha Kucha format) for this Summit, and I was fortunate enough to give one for Herbert and I entitled "Why We Need Multiple Archives".  The answer is probably pretty obvious for the crowd that Martin assembled, but we often run into people that don't understand the role of archives beyond that of t

The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library  (University of Toronto) Between March 3 - March 5, 2016, Librarians, Archivists, Historians, Computer Scientists, etc., came together for the Archives Unleashed Web Archive Hackathon at the University of Toronto Robarts Library, Toronto, Ontario Canada. This event gave researchers the opportunity to collaboratively develop open-source tools for web archives. The event was organized by Ian Milligan , (assistant professor of Canadian and digital history in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo), Nathalie Casemajor (assistant professor in communication studies in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Québec in Outaouais (Canada)), Jimmy Lin (the David R. Cheriton Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo), Matthew Weber (Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University), and Nicholas Worby (the Government Information &

As I have mentioned previously , I am the MITRE chair of the Federal Cloud Computing summit . The Summits are designed to allow representatives from government agencies that would not necessarily cross paths to collaborate and learn from one another about the best practices, challenges, and recommendations for adopting emerging technologies in the federal government. The MITRE- ATARC Collaboration Symposium is a working group-style session in which academics, representatives from industry, government, and FFRDC representatives discuss potential solutions and ways-forward for the top challenges of emerging technology adoption in government. MITRE helps select the challenge areas by polling government practitioners on their top challenges, and the participants break into groups to discuss each challenge area. The Collaboration Symposium allows this heterogeneous group of cloud practitioners to collaborate across all levels, from the end users to researchers to practitioners to po

The CNI Fall 2015 Membership Meeting was held in Washington, D.C., December 14-15, 2015.  Like all CNI meetings, the Fall 2015 meeting was excellent and contained many high quality presentations.  Unfortunately, the members' project briefings ran simultaneously, with 7 or 8 different presentations overlapping at any given time.  As a result I missed a great deal.  Cliff Lynch kicked off the meeting with reflections about public access to federally funded research (e.g., CRS R42983 ), interoperability (e.g., OAI-ORE , ORCIDs , IIIF ), linked data (e.g., Wikipedia notability guidelines for biographies ),  privacy & surveillance (e.g., eavesdropping Barbies , Ashley Madison data breach , RFC 7624 ), and understanding the personalization algorithms that go into presenting (and thus archiving) the view of the web that you experience (e.g., our 2013 D-Lib Magazine article about mobile vs. desktop & GeoIP ), and much more.  I'm hesitant to try to further summarize his ta

From November 2nd through November 5th, Dr. Nelson , Dr. Weigle , and I attended the iPRES2015 conference at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill . This served as a return visit for Drs. Nelson and Weigle; Dr. Nelson worked at UNC through a NASA fellowship and Dr. Weigle received her PhD from UNC. We also met with Martin Klein , a WS-DL alumnus now at the UCLA Library. While the last ODU contingent to visit UNC was not so lucky, we returned to Norfolk relatively unscathed. Cal Lee and Helen Tibbo opened the conference with a welcome on November 3rd, followed by Nancy McGovern 's keynote address delivered with Leo Konstantelos and Maureen Pennock . This was not a traditional keynote, but instead an interactive dialogue in which several challenge areas were presented to the audience, and the audience responded -- live and on twitter -- significant achievements or advances in those challenge areas from #lastyear. For example, Dr. Nelson identified the #iCanHazMemento