Friday, July 06, 2012

Home from the WAC Summer Workshop

Last week the WAC Summer Workshop was held on the beautiful campus of Stanford University. This two day workshop was sponsored by the NSF as part of our WAC project. A diverse group of twenty-one graduate students (most from computer science and library science) met to learn more about web archiving and the many challenges archivists face in collecting and making the data accessible to a wide audience. The three Harding students working with me this summer (Heather, Richard, and Daniel) were also in attendance.

A number of excellent presentations were shared, and you can access many of the slides from the workshop's schedule page. Scott Ainsworth has written up a nice summary of the workshop on the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group blog.

The Sunday following the workshop, Becky and I took the three Harding students up to San Francisco to spend the day since their flight was not until late in the evening. Our first stop was the Lake Merced Church of Christ where we worshiped with the small congregation that meets there. We met a number of individuals who had ties back to Harding. After eating lunch with the church, we headed north to the Golden Gate Bridge. We walked the length of the bridge, and it was rather cool, windy, and cloudy as you can see from the photo below.

After our "little" walk, we continued north to the Muir Woods where we saw some incredibly huge redwood trees. The photo below shows us standing between two of the larger trees in the forest.

We later drove around San Francisco and saw as much as we could before we had to drop off our van and the students. Becky and I stayed in San Francisco for a couple of more days to celebrate our nine year anniversary. I won't bore you with all the details of our vacation, but I'll close with this last photo which Becky took of me playing a vintage Star Wars arcade game at the Musée Mécanique. I was also able to play some other classics from the 1980s: Spy Hunter and Robotron: 2084!