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Showing posts from October, 2010

2010-10-21: RRAC Presentation

Tuesday, I gave a presentation introducing some of the research we are doing in our WSDL group to the Records and Archivists (RRAC) national meeting. This group is made of archivists at Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (like MITRE and Aerospace ) and University Archivists. Digital Preservation - ODU from Justin Brunelle I used slides from several of Dr. Nelson's and Martin Klein's presentations (credits recently given in the last slide). I also gave the same presentation to the Agile Development department (of which Carlton is a member) on Tuesday. Both groups widely received the research and had very interesting ideas and comments. The RRAC folks (who were of non-technical backgrounds) questioned the projected lifespan and availability of archives like the Internet Archive (IA) . We also discussed the possibility of the Twitter virus being stored in the IA (and I have yet to investigate this possibility). The other interesting topic of disc

2010-10-11: A Blast from the past: My road to Ws-Dl!

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Hello everyone, I am Hany SalahEldeen, a PhD student in my first year and I am honored to be a new member of the Ws-Dl group at Old Dominion University and supervised by Dr. Michael Nelson. I have been in the group for a couple of months now so I thought I should introduce myself and give a background summary on my career before Ws-Dl because I believe if you didn't know where you were, you will never know where you are going. I received my BSc. in Computer Systems Engineering at Alexandria University, Egypt in 2008. My graduation project entitled " VOID: The web-based integrated development environment " was selected to win the first prize in the graduation projects competition in the University for year 2008. For the last 2 years of my degree I was working in a software company back home called eSpace technologies , I worked in developing systems using Ruby on Rails , and was one of the members who developed Neverblock (an open source project to enable easy developmen

2010-10-11: ArchiveFacebook Version 1.2 is released

Celebrating a year from the very first release of ArchiveFacebook the development team is releasing the new version 1.2. Throughout the last couple of months we have received feedback from the users asking for enhancements and resolving issues. We also received lots of compliments and thumbs up! This feedback was channeled and analyzed to give us an idea on how to enhance the user experience. We released version 1.2 3 days ago with lots of bug fixes and new features, among which the expansion of stories and posts on comments. Several users suggested that it would be useful to be able to archive all the posts and comments on a certain activity (status update, event attendance, photo...etc). Now V 1.2 can support this and any activity stream within your Facebook profile. The new version seems to be highly anticipated to an extent that the number of downloads within the first 3 days even before announcing the release reached 2000 according to Mozilla: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir

2010-10-04: WAC Kickoff Meeting; LC Storage Architectures Meeting, DPC Award Shortlist

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On September 24, I attended the kickoff meeting at Stanford for the Web Archiving Cooperative (WAC) Project, a joint NSF project (~$2.8M) between Stanford , Old Dominion and Harding . A summary of the meeting will be published at a later date, but it was attended by several members of our Advisory Board (from memory: Chris Borgman (UCLA), Trisha Cruse (CDL), Rick Furuta (TAMU), Alon Halevy (Google), Carl Lagoze (Cornell), Raghu Ramakrishnan (Yahoo), Herbert Van de Sompel (LANL)) and several members and friends of the Stanford Infolab . I gave two presentations, the first was a quick review of the state of web preservation (with the obligatory heavy emphasis on Memento ), and the second was some of my ruminations about future things that we should (or should not) explore in the context of WAC. Review of Web Archiving View more presentations from Michael Nelson . My Point of View: Michael L. Nelson Web Archiving Cooperative View more presentations from Michael Nelson . That ni