Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On September 20, 2019, I attended the Machine Learning + Libraries Summit at the Library of Congress. The aim of the meeting is to gather computer and information scientists, engineers, data scientists, and Liberians from reputable universities, government agencies, and industrial companies to come up with ideas on a bunch of questions such as how to expand the service of digital libraries, how to establish a good collaboration with  other groups on machine learning projects, and what factors to consider to design a sustainable machine learning project, especially in the digital library domain. In the initial solicitation, the focus was cultural heritage, but the discussion went far beyond that. The meeting features many interesting lightning talks. Unfortunately, due to the relatively short time allocated, many questions and discussions have to go offline. The organizer also arranged several activities, stimulating brainstorm discussion and teamwork between people from differen...

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 per...

Mat Kelly and Dr. Michael L. Nelson travel to Washington, DC and both report on their current research as well as be made aware of others' work in the field.                            On July 22 and 23, 2014, Dr. Michael Nelson ( @phonedude_mln ) and I ( @machawk1 ) attended Digital Preservation 2014 in Washington, DC. This was my fourth consecutive NDIIPP ( @ndiipp ) / NDSA ( @ndsa2 ) meeting (see trip reports from Digital Preservation 2011 , 2012 , 2013 ). With the largest attendance yet (300+) and compressed into two days, the schedule was jam-packed with interesting talks. Per usual, videos for most of the presentations are included inline below. Day One Micah Altman ( @drmaltman ) led the presentations with information about the NDSA and asked, regarding Amazon claiming reliability of 99.99999999999% for uptime, "What do the eleve...