The Memento project adds a time dimension to the Web: enter the Web address of a resource in your browser and set a time slider to a desired moment in the Web’s past, and see what the resource looked like around that time. Memento has received significant international attention since it was presented at the Fall 2009 Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Membership Meeting, and several indicators suggest that a new stage on the path towards acceptance and deployment has been reached.

This project briefing will provide an overview of recent developments regarding the proposed framework, the availability of tools, ongoing adoption, and standardization. Special attention will be paid to new insights, challenges, and opportunities that have emerged since Memento’s early days, including discovery and branding of archived Web content, the mapping of Memento concepts to a variety of systems that host archived/stable Web content, and the applicability of Memento’s time travel notions to data.

Also, as part of the Memento project, explorations into alternative Web archiving strategies have started. Specifically, the focus is on archival approaches that do not rely on Web crawling but rather are based on a transactional paradigm: Web content is archived at the very moment it is being used. The presentation will include a report on the status of ongoing activities in this realm that are aimed at releasing open source software.

Herbert Van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Michael L. Nelson (Old Dominion University), and Robert Sanderson are project co-collaborators.

http://www.mementoweb.org/

Presentation

Video:
“Memento: Giant Leaps Towards Seamless Navigation of the Past Web”