Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

We are pleased to report that the W3C has embraced Memento for versioning its specifications and its wiki. Completing this effort required collaboration between the W3C and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Research Library Prototyping Team . Here we inform others of the brief history of this effort and provide an overview of the technical aspects of the work done to make Memento at the W3C. Brief History of Memento Work with the W3C The W3C uses Memento for two separate systems: W3C specifications W3C wiki Memento was implemented on both of these systems in 2016, but there were a lot of discussions and changes in direction along the way. In 2010, Herbert Van de Sompel presented Memento as part of the Linked Data on the Web Workshop (LDOW) at WWW . The presentation was met with much enthusiasm. In fact, Sir Tim Berners-Lee stated "this is neat and there is a real need for it". Later, he met with Herbert to suggest that Memento could be used

On August 21-23, 2016, I attended the Advisory Board Meeting for the Documenting the Now (DocNow) project at the Washington University in St. Louis .  The DocNow project is f unded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation "aims to collect, archive, and provide access to social media feeds chronicling historically significant events, particularly concerning social justice."   In practice, this means providing a friendly interface for interacting with trending events on Twitter (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter and affiliated hashtags).  This is significant because tools like twarc (created by Ed Summers , the technical lead for DocNow), a widely used Twitter archiving command line tool, are not within the scope of non-expert users.  The DocNow has a strong project team and a diverse advisory board , of which I am honored to be a member of.  The team has been pretty active on github , slack , Twitter , etc., but those are no substitute for an extended f2f meeting. The day began on th

Two Web Science & Digital Library ( WS-DL ) courses will be offered in Fall 2016:  CS 418/518 " Web Programming ", Tuesdays 4:20-7:00 pm (CRNs 16680 & 16681 ), will be offered by Dr. Justin F. Brunelle .  This will be an updated version of CS 418 last taught in Spring 2015 by Mat Kelly .  This class is currently full, but watch for openings. CS 734/834 " Introduction to Information Retrieval ", Thursdays 4:20-7:00 pm (CRNs 15028 & 15038 ) offered by Dr. Michael L. Nelson .  This will be an updated version of the same course most recently taught in Fall 2015 .  Note that Dr. Michele Weigle is not teaching this semester.  Obviously there is demand for CS 418/518, but if you're considering CS 734/834 you might be interested in this student's quote from a recent exit exam: [and] Dr. Nelson’s Information Retrieval course are the two which I feel have prepared me most for job interviews and work in the working world of computer science.

In a previous post , we discussed a way to use the existing Memento protocol combined with link headers to access unaltered (raw) archived web content. Interest in unaltered content has grown as more use cases arise for web archives. Ilya Kremer and David Rosenthal had previously suggested that a new dimension of content negotiation would be necessary to allow clients to access unaltered content. That idea was not originally pursued, because it would have required the standardization of new HTTP headers. At the time, none of us were aware of the standard Prefer header from RFC7240 . Prefer can solve this problem in an intuitive way much like their original suggestion of content negotiation. To recap, most web archives augment mementos when presenting them to the user, often for usability or legal purposes. The figures below show examples of these augmentations. Figure 1: The PRONI web archive augments mementos for user experience; augmentations outlined in red Fi