Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On Monday, November 16 2009 Herbert and I went to the Library of Congress and presented slides from our Memento eprint (see the previous post for a short description of Memento). On Thursday, November 19 2009 Herbert gave the same presentation at OCLC . Below are the slides that were presented as well as supporting movie. Fortunately, the slides & movie were finished in between ODU sporadically losing power over the weekend due to the Nor'easter , and on Tuesday when odusource.cs.odu.edu and mementoarchive.cs.odu.edu were brought down by a disk failure. Thanks to Scott Ainsworth and the ODU systems staff for their yeoman's work on getting everything back up and running. Slides & movie from the Library of Congress Brown Bag Seminar: Memento: Time Travel for the Web from Herbert Van de Sompel 2010-02-12 Edit: The recorded presentation has just been uploaded to the Library of Congress web site. Also, Memento has enjoyed considerable press &

This is a follow-up to my post on October 5 , where I mentioned the availability of the Memento project web site. Herbert 's team and my team, working under an NDIIPP grant , have introduced a framework where you can browse the past web (i.e., old versions of web pages) in the same manner that you browse the current web. The framework uses HTTP content negotiation as a method for requesting the version of the page you want. Most people know little about content negotiation, and the little they think they know is often wrong (see [1-3] for more information about CN). In a nutshell, CN allows you to link to a URI "foo" but, for example, without specifying its format (e.g., "foo.html" vs. "foo.pdf") or language ("foo.html.en" vs. "foo.html.es"). Your browser automatically passes preferences to the server (e.g., "I slightly prefer HTML over PDF, and I greatly prefer English to Spanish") and the server tries to find its be

October was a busy travel month. On October 11-13, I attended a technical meeting for the Open Annotation Collaboration project at Berkeley, CA. From there, I traveled to Berlin, Germany to give a keynote about OAI-ORE at the Wireless Communication and Information Conference (WCI 2009). Michael Herzog was kind enough to invite me to speak there again; I also gave an invited talk at Media Production 2007 , also in Berlin. After a short week back in the US, it was off to Lima, Peru to give another keynote about OAI-ORE, this time at Reunión Interamericana de Bibliotecarios, Documentalistas y Especialistas en Información Agrícola, or RIBDA 2009 . This was also another repeat performance -- I had given an invited talk about OAI-PMH in Lima in 2004 , and my colleague there, Libio Huaroto, invited me back. Slides from the keynotes are probably available on the conference web sites, however they were both edited versions of the more detailed ORE seminar I recently gave at Emory