Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

UPDATE: Download the latest version of Mink here . The goal of the Memento project is to provide a tighter integration between the past and current web.    There are a number of clients now that provide this functionality, but they remain silent about the archived page until the user remembers to invoke them (e.g., by right-clicking on a link). We have created another approach based on persistently reminding the user just how well archived (or not) are the pages they visit.  The Chrome extension Mink (short for Minkowski Space ) queries all the public web archives (via the Memento aggregator) in the background and will display the number of mementos (that is, the number of captures of the web page) available at the bottom right of the page.  Selecting the indicator allows quick access to the mementos through a dropdown.  Once in the archives, returning to the live web is as simple as clicking the "Back to Live Web" button. For the case where there are...

From Modern Family  to the Girl with the Dragon Tatoo , fans have created a flood of fan-based wikis based on their favorite television, book, and movie series. This dedication to fiction has allowed fans to settle disputes and encourage discussion using these resources. These resources, coupled with the rise in experiencing fiction long after it is initially released, has given rise to another cultural phenomenon: spoilers . Using a fan-based resource is wonderful for those who are current with their reading/watching, but is fraught with disaster for those who want to experience the great reveals  and have not caught up yet. Memento can help here. Above is a video showing how the  Memento Chrome Extension  from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) can be used to avoid spoilers while browsing for information on Downtown Abbey . This wiki is of particular interest because the TV show is released in the United Kingdom long before it is released in ...

Herbert and Martin attended the recent Fall 2013 CNI meeting in Washington DC, where they gave an update about the Hiberlink Project (joint with the University of Edinburgh), which is about preserving the referential integrity of the scholarly record. In other words, we link to the general web in our technical publications (and not just other scholarly material) and of course the links rot over time.  But the scholarly publication environment does give us several hooks to help us access web archives to uncover the correct material. As always, there are many slides but they are worth the time to study them.  Of particular importance are slides 8--18, which helps differentiate Hiberlink from other projects, and slides 66-99 which walk through a demonstration of the " Missing Link " concepts (along with the Memento for Chrome extension ) can be used to address the problem of link rot.  In particular, absent specific versiondate attributes on a link, such as: <a ...

Last week LANL released Memento for Chrome , an extension that adds Memento capability for Chrome browsers.  It represents such a leap in capability and speed that the prior MementoFox (Memento for FireFox) add-on should be considered deprecated.  It's not just a FireFox vs. Chrome thing either; Memento for Chrome features a subtle change in how it interacts with the past and present.  MementoFox had a toggle switch for present vs. Time Travel mode that would trap and modify all outbound requests , from the current page and all subsequent pages until turned off, to go from the form of: http://example.com/index.html to: http://mementoproxy.lanl.gov/aggr/timegate/http://example.com/index.html This involved some complicated logic to determine when you were getting a memento (i.e., archived web entity) vs. something from the live web.  When you factored in native Memento archives vs. proxied Memento archives, things could get hairy (see the 2011 Code4Lib pa...

As the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group, we regularly interact with end users as well as developers that are interested in digital preservation. One of our goals is to assist in making web preservation accessible to regular users instead of just power users.  As computer scientists, this frequently means creating software. A few digital preservation software packages that were created by WS-DLers include: Because shrimp, that's why. Warrick - a utility for reconstructing (or recovering) a website using various archives and caches. Synchronicity - a Firefox extension that supports the user in rediscovering missing web pages mcurl - a command-line memento client and two that are dear to my heart: And other sea creatures WARCreate - a Google Chrome extension that allows you to create WARC files from any webpage Web Archiving Integration Layer (WAIL) - a re-packaged Wayback and Heritrix that aims to be "One-Click User Instigated Preservatio...