Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Recent trends in digital libraries are towards integration with the architecture of the World Wide Web . The award-winning Memento Project proposes extending HTTP to provide protocol-level access to mementos (archived previous states) of web resources. Using content negotiation and other protocol operations, rather than archive-specific methods, Memento provides the digital library and preservation community with a standardized method to navigate between the original resource and its mementos. Memento Client State Chart The ODU Web Sciences and Digital Libraries Research Group has partnered with the LANL Research Library to create Memento and develop prototype Memento-compliant client and server implementations. A variety of Memento clients have been created, tested, and co-evolved along with the Memento protocol. There is now a FireFox extension , Internet Explorer browser helper object, and WebKit -based Android browser . The design and technical solutions identified during the d

The devastation wrought by the 11 March earthquake in Japan, and the depths of the human misery left in the wake of the massive Tsunami have left many people awestruck. The size of the quake itself was enormous and many people have had a hard time comprehending just how big this earthquake was. Some sites like Japan Quake Map help us to comprehend the magnitude of this event. As a result of the earthquake and tsunami the nuclear reactor at Dai-ichi was severely damaged and has been leaking radiation. The radiation readings have been made available by WIDE and Japan's Nuclear Safety Division . The idea was to use R to create an informative map of Japan showing the radiation levels of the different prefectures. Python was used to import the data from both of the web sites and insert it into a MySQL database. The format of both of the pages was understandably quite dynamic and resulted in the python script needing to be tweaked quite often. Sometimes it was easier to just copy

I have just returned from MITRE 's Records Expo on MITRE's Campus in McLean, VA . The Records Expo is designed to raise awareness of the archival responsibilities of employees within MITRE, and also inform our sponsors about the archives and records management work we're doing. I was invited to present some of the research being done in digital preservation at ODU and MITRE. (George Despres and I have recently received funding to perform digital preservation research on the digital objects living within the corporate intranet. Our research was explained at the Expo.) Records expo View more presentations from Justin Brunelle We set up booths in the MITRE 2 building, equipped with big-screen TVs with slide shows about other archival and records management systems being pioneered at MITRE (the slides are For Office Use Only, and cannot be shared in this blog). Several MITRE employees attended and listened to presentations given by the archives team and the records