JCDL 2013 wrap-up

Last week I attended JCDL 2013 in Indianapolis along with Harding students Keith Enlow, Monica Yarbrough, and Daniel Sebastian. It's been four years since the last time I attended the conference, and it was great to see a lot of old friends. Below are friends from my days at Old Dominion University: Johan Bollen (now at Indiana Univ), Michael Nelson (still at ODU), and Martin Klein (now at LANL).

For a very thorough summary of the conference, see Justin Brunelle's blog post. There's some nice pictures here of the hotel and other events. Below I am going to highlight the work that my students and I presented. By the way, the Harding students who attended with me were the youngest attendees at the conference. This was a great experience for them, getting to interact with graduate students and researchers at their first academic conference.

The first day of the conference I presented a short paper that I co-authored with Richard Schneider entitled First Steps in Archiving the Mobile Web: Automated Discovery of Mobile Websites. This was work that Richard did as an undergraduate student in the summer of 2012 in which we try to automatically detect the URL for mobile sites so they can be archived.

The next evening Daniel Sebastian shared his poster Semi-Automated Rediscovery of Lost YouTube Music Videos. Daniel built a Firefox add-on called Volitrax last summer which helps Firefox automatically relocate music videos in YouTube when they are removed.

I manned Heather Tweedy's poster: A Memento Web Browser for iOS. Heather completed the iOS Memento Browser last summer, and I recently completed a new version for Android. The browser allows you to see web pages as they used to look using Memento underneath the hood.

After the conference concluded, we attended the Web Archiving and Digital Libraries Workshop (WADL 2013) which was organized by Ed Fox. There were about 20 of us in attendance, and with this smaller group we were able to have a lot of discussion about the work each of us was doing with web archives.

I gave an introduction into the problem of archiving the mobile web, and Monica followed with her work this summer on building a web service that others could use to find mobile websites. Keith concluded our joint talk with his work on getting Heritrix to archive some mobile sites. Our slides are below.

I really had a great time in Indianapolis. One unique thing I did there was to visit the Star Wars exhibit at the Indiana State Museum. They had all original costumes and models from the movies. It was a really cool exhibit for a Star Wars fan. I just wish my boys could have been there to see it!