Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

In this work, I collected the top 20 Arabic websites that I like and browse, and in my personal judgment consider as popular (shown in Table 1). For each, I checked its ranking globally and locally based on Alexa Ranking . Then I used MemGator tool to check if it is archived, and got the estimated creation date based on the first memento date. After that, I checked who archived the webpage first (shown in Table 2). Arabic websites in general were evaluated based on how well they were archived and indexed in my previous work, How Well Are Arabic Websites Archived? . We sampled 300,646 Arabic language pages, and found that 46% are not archived and 31% are not indexed by Google . Table 1: List of my favorite Arabic Websites and its description Website Site Description maktoob.yahoo.com Yahoo! مكتوب A major internet portal and email service provider in Arabic language. aljazeera.net الجزيرة نت News channel, political, economic, and thoughts. 6a...

As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Internet Archive , I realize that using Memento and the Wayback Machine has become second nature when solving certain problems, not only in my research, but also in my life. Those who have read my Master's Thesis, Avoiding Spoilers on Mediawiki Fan Sites Using Memento , know that I am a fan of many fictional television shows and movies. URIs are discussed in these fictional worlds , and sometimes the people making the fiction actually register these URIs , seen in the example below, creating an additional vector for fans to find information on their favorite characters and worlds. Real web site at http://www.piedpiper.com/ for the fictional company Pied Piper from HBO's TV series  Silicon Valley Unfortunately, interest in maintaining these URIs fades once the television show is cancelled or the movie is no longer showing. As noted in my thesis, the advent of services like Netflix and Hulu allow fans to watch old televisio...

Richard Poynder 's recent blog post " Q&A with CNI’s Clifford Lynch: Time to re-think the institutional repository? " has generated a lot of discussion, including a second post from Richard to address the comments and the always insightful commentary from David Rosenthal (" Why Did Institutional Repositories Fail? ").  There surely have been enough articles about institutional repositories to fill an institutional repository, but of particular interest to me are discussions about the technical and aspirational goals of OAI-PMH . A year ago Herbert and I reflected on OAI-PMH and other projects (" Reminiscing About 15 Years of Interoperability Efforts "), which I wish Richard would have referenced in his discussion (although Cliff does allude to this in his interview (MLN edit: Richard points out that I missed his quoting of that paper in his second blog post )), as well as the original SFC and UPS papers.  For his response to Richard, ...

Dodging the Memory Hole 2016 , held at UCLA's Charles Young Research Library in Los Angeles California, was a two-day event to discuss and highlight potential solutions to the issue of preserving born-digital news. Organized by Edward McCain  (digital curator of journalism at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute and University of Missouri Libraries) this event brought together technologists, archivists, librarians, journalists and fourteen graduate students who had won travel scholarships for attendance.  Among the attendees were four members of the WS-DL  group (l-r): Mat Kelly ,  John Berlin ,  Dr. Michael Nelson , and  Shawn Jones . The event was made possible by support from the  Reynolds Journalism Institute ,  Journalism Digital News Archive (JDNA) ,  UCLA Library ,  the Educopia  Institute   and the Institute of Museum and Library Services  (IMLS) . Day 1 (October 13, 2016) Day...

"Team Turtle" in Archive Unleashed in Washington DC (from left to right: N. Chah, S. Marti, M. Aturban , and I. Amin) The first presidential debate (H. Clinton v. D. Trump) took place on last Monday, September 26, 2016 at Hofstra University , New York. The questions were about topics like economy, taxes, jobs, and race. During the debate, the candidates mentioned those topics (and other issues) and, in many cases, they associated a topic with a particular place or a US state (e.g., shootings in Chicago, Illinois, and crime rate in New York). This reminded me about the work that we had done in the second Archives Unleashed Hackathon , held at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. I worked with the "Team Turtle" ( Niel Chah , Steve Marti , Mohamed Aturban , and Imaduddin Amin ) on analyzing an archived collection, provided by the Library of Congress, about the 2004 Presidential Election (G. Bush v. J. Kerry). The collection contained hundreds of archived w...