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November 19, 2009
Memento: Time Travel for the Web : OCLC Research Distinguished Seminar Series Presentation
The topic of web archiving is enough to make your head spin, or at least feel like you are at the bottom of a very large ice berg... Herbert Van de Sompel (from Los Alamos National Laboratory) spoke this morning at OCLC about the current project focusing on some of the issues relevant to web archiving, called Memento. I found a similar talk and powerpoint slides from this morning's talk that include some of the visual represenations of how the underpinnings of the programming side.
Van de Sompel mentioned some other efforts to archive previous versions of websites, such as the Internet Archive. While this site did capture websites beginning in 1996 (an early Case Western Reserve homepage from the Internet Archive), it was rather intermittent when the capture took place. Van de Sompel spoke about integrating navigation- to provide a means to combine multiple manifestations of a page (particularly news content) in a way that is easier to navigate, or in his terms 'transparent content negotiation'. There were also terms of 'time gate' and 'time map' that may sound more something out of a science fiction book, but what was really interesting about Van de Sompel's lecture was addressing not only the navigating issues of dealing with multiple versioned content, while also dealing with the display and content of the changing websites. His work on Memento addresses the attempt to correlate these diverse efforts, into a single feed and display that is capable of accounting for muliple time points. This creates a method to navigate these web pages over time, and is certainly less clunky that the Internet Archive. A demo is currently up on the Memento project site.
Related article: Memento: Time Travel for the Web
Posted by vad17 at November 19, 2009 07:52 PM
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