Herbert Van de Sompel, Research Library Prototyping Team Lead at Los Alamos National Laboratory, spoke at OCLC on 19 November 2009.
A recording of his presentation and the discussion that followed, including video and slides, is now available as a streaming webcast. Individual files of the audio and slides from his presentation are also available.
From the Presentation Abstract:
Have you ever felt frustrated by your inability to get to old versions of Web pages? Did you bookmark a page last year, and revisited it recently only to find that the current content isn't even remotely related to what caught your interest back then?
Remnants of the past Web are available, and there are many efforts ongoing to archive even more Web content. It's just that the past Web is not as readily accessible as today's. For example, if you want to see an archived version of http://cnn.com, you can go to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and search for it there. Or if you want to see an old version of the Wikipedia page about—say—clocks, you can go to the current page and from there follow a link to one of the many prior versions. And, if you are interested in stories that featured on the BBC news site on your last year's birthday, you can explore the archive that Matthew Somerville set up in his spare time.
But doesn't doing so feel more like walking to a library, than using the Web the way you usually do? Wouldn't it be much easier if you could just connect to cnn.com, Wikipedia, or news.bbc.co.uk indicating that you are interested in the pages of March 20 2008, not the current ones? If you could activate a time machine in your browser or bot? The Memento solution that we propose to achieve this is based on existing HTTP capabilities applied in a novel way to add the temporal dimension. The result is a framework in which archived resources can seamlessly be reached via the URI of their original: protocol-based time travel for the Web.
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