Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Traditionally,  Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) has hosted a workshop session called Doctoral Consortium (DC) specific to PhD students of digital library research field and this year (JCDL 2016) was no exception. The workshop was intended for students that are in the early stages of their dissertation work. Several WS-DL group members attended and reported past DC workshops and this time it was my turn. This year's doctoral consortium (June 19, 2016) was chaired by  George Buchanan ,  J. Stephen Downie , and  Uma Murthy . Committee members included  Sally Jo Cunningham ,  Michael Nelson ,  Martin Klein , and  Edie Rasmussen . A total of six PhD students participated in the workshop and presented their work. The doctoral consortium session is generally not open for public participation, however,  Michele C. Weigle (JCDL 2016 program chair), Mat Kelly ( last year's DC participant), and Alexandar Nwala (potential future participant) also attended th

On June 16, 2016, the Library of Congress hosted a one day Symposium entitled  Saving the Web: The Ethics and Challenges of Preserving What's on the Internet . The Symposium came at the end of the  Archives Unleashed  2.0 Web Archive Datathon. The Datathon itself is covered in an earlier report . In addition to presenting the results of datathon projects, the wide variety of speakers at the symposium defended the need for preservation, discussed the special issues associated with preservation of data, and finally highlighted the importance and concepts surrounding the preservation of multimedia. Keynote by Vint Cerf The symposium opened with Dame Wendy Hall , Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton and Kluge Chair in Science and Technology at the Library of Congress . She mentioned that the Internet has only been available for a few decades and we need to preserve its openness and freedom, because that openness and freedom are always in peril.  She u

Members from WSDL who participated in the Hackathon 2.0 Last week, June 13-15, 2016, six members of Web Science and Digital Library group ( WSDL ) from Old Dominion University had the opportunity to attend the second Archives Unleashed 2.0 at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. This event is a follow-up to the Archives Unleashed ( Web Archive Hackathon 1.0 ) held in March 2015 at the University of Toronto Library, Toronto, Ontario Canada. We ( Mat Kelly , Alexander Nwala , John Berlin , Sawood Alam , Shawn Jones , and Mohamed Aturban ) met with other participants, from various countries, who have different backgrounds -- librarians, historians, computer scientists, etc. The main goal of this event is to build tools for web archives as well as to support this kind of ongoing community to have a common vision of how to access and extract data from web collections. This event was made possible with generous support from the National Science Foundation , the Social Science