My talk to introduce Web Archiving and the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group to some invited students from India for a summer workshop in Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA

1. Introducing
Web Archiving and
WSDL Research Group
Sawood Alam
Department of Computer Science
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, Virginia - 23529 (USA)

2. About Me
Sawood Alam
Lexical Signature
Web, Digital Library, Web Archiving, Ruby on Rails, PHP, HTML,
CSS, JavaScript, ExtJS, Go, Urdu, RTL, Docker, and Linux.
● BTech, Jamia Millia Islamia, India, 2008
● MSc, Old Dominion University, USA, 2013
● PhD, Old Dominion University, USA, Current

3. She Calls Me Dad!

4. Agenda
● Archiving and Web archiving
● Purpose and importance
● Scope of the web archiving
● Issues and challenges
● Tools and techniques
● Memento: Time Travel for the Web
● Archive X-Ray
● Research opportunities in Web archiving
● Our WSDL Research Group

5. What is an Archive?
● Accumulation of historical records
● Long term storage and preservation
● Less frequently used
● Physical or digital

6. What is Web Archiving?
● Periodic snapshots of web pages
● Preserving important events on the Web
● Making archived content accessible

7. Why do We Care Archiving?
Web contents decay rapidly!
● To preserve the history
● To tell a story
● For evidence
● For backup
● For personal satisfaction

8. Issues and Challenges
● Crawling
● Storage
● Retrieval
● Replay
● Accessibility
● Completeness
● Accuracy
● Credibility

9. Web Archiving Efforts
● Internet Archive
● Archive-It
● Wikipedia
● UK Web Archive
● Various national and non-profit archives
● Film, music and other multimedia archives
● Scholarly archives
● Personal archiving

10. Tools and Techniques
● Heritrix, PhantomJS, WGet, cURL
● OpenWayback, PyWB
● TimeTravel, MemGator
● CarbonDate, Warrick, Synchronicity
● Preserve Me!
● WARCreate,WAIL, Mink
● Browsertrix
● And many more...

11. Memento
<http://example.com>; rel="original",
<http://web.archive.org/web/20020120142510/http://example.com/>;
rel="memento";
datetime="Sun, 20 Jan 2002 14:25:10 GMT",
<http://web.archive.org/web/20020328012821/http://www.example.com/>;
rel="memento";
datetime="Thu, 28 Mar 2002 01:28:21 GMT",
<http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20020803080544/http://www.example.com/>;
rel="memento";
datetime="Sat, 03 Aug 2002 08:05:44 GMT",
<http://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20091213015014/http://www.example.com/>;
rel="memento";
datetime="Sun, 13 Dec 2009 01:50:14 GMT",

12. Archive X-Ray!
● How much of the Web is archived?
● Profiling various archive services
● Predicting what they contain
● Routing Memento aggregator queries

17. MemGator
https://github.com/oduwsdl/memgator

18. MemGator
http://memgator.cs.odu.edu:1208/

19. Memento Aggregator

20. Memento Aggregator

21. Memento Aggregator

22. Memento Aggregator

23. Memento Aggregator

24. Memento Aggregator

25. From: Michael Nelson [mailto:mln@cs.odu.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, December 02, 2015 12:33 PM
To: Jones, Gina
Cc: Rourke, Patrick; Grotke, Abigail
Subject: Re: WebSciDL
Hi Gina, I'll investigate. memgator is software that one my students
wrote, but I suspect the traffic you're seeing is b/c it is deployed in
http://oldweb.today/ can you share the IP addr from where you're
seeing the traffic? I presume the requests are for Memento TimeMaps?
It should not being actually scraping HTML pages.
regards,
Michael
On Wed, 2 Dec 2015, Jones, Gina wrote:
> Hi Michael, we have a slight configuration issue with the current OW
> set up for our webarchives. I think, from looking at the logs, that
> "MemGator:1.0-rc3 <@WebSciDL>" is really causing some issues on
our wayback.
> Do you know who is running this scraper? Itʼs not part of memento is
it?
>
> Gina Jones
> Web Archiving Team
> Library of Congress
From: Ilya Kreymer <ikreymer@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2015 10:33:56 -0800
Subject: high traffic on oldweb!
To: Herbert Van de Sompel <hvdsomp@gmail.com>, Sawood Alam
<ibnesayeed@gmail.com>
Hi Herbert, Sawood,
Herbert: Perhaps you are lucky that I am not using the LANL
aggregator, as the traffic has gotten really high, and also I was asked
to remove an archive due to the traffic it was causing temporarily..
I am thinking that ability to remove source archives quickly is an
important aspect of an aggregator.
Sawood: Hopefully yours will support something like this so I don't
need to restart the container to change the archivelist ;)
Ilya
Broadcasting is Bad

26. Memento Routing

27. Long Tail of Archives

28. While the IA was Down...
$ memgator -f cdxj example.org | cut -c-4 | grep -v "^@" | uniq -c
2 2002
1 2005
1 2008
6 2009
67 2010
17 2011
64 2012
108 2013
108 2014
186 2015
51 2016

29. Archive Profile
● High-level summary of an archive
● Predicts presence of mementos
● Provides statistics about the holdings
● Small in size and publicly available
● Easy to update and partially patch
● Useful for Memento query routing and
other things
com,cnn)/ {“frequency”: 40, “spread”: 2}
uk,co,bbc)/ {“frequency”: 20, “spread”: 1}
com,usatoday)/ {“frequency”: 5, “spread”: 1}

30. Research Opportunities
● Information retrieval
● Information visualization
● Client and server side archiving
● Archiving dynamic content
● Distributed archiving
● Discovering alternate long term archiving
techniques
● Predicting “Important” events on the Web
and archiving them timely

31. Web Science and Digital
Libraries Research Group
ws-dl.cs.odu.edu
ws-dl.blogspot.com
@WebSciDL
github.com/oduwsdl
flickr.com/photos/124419986@N07

32. ODU Sailing Center

33. WSDL Feast

34. WSDL Whiteboards

35. WSDL Surprise

36. WSDL Ping Pong Table

37. WSDL Travels

38. Sawood Alam
Department of Computer Science
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, Virginia - 23529 (USA)
salam@cs.odu.edu
ibnesayeed@gmail.com
@ibnesayeed
www.cs.odu.edu/~salam