India Internet News
Trace Internet Over Time With Memento
28 July 2011
A computer science professor in Virginia's Old Dominion University, Michael Nelson, is commonly called as the 'Time Traveler of the Internet'. This is because of his Memento project that traces the Internet with time.
He says, "The society is not doing a good job of preserving what we produce in terms of information." He suggests that we should archive the worldwide web properly so that one can revisit it anytime. His intention is to link the gap between publishing and preserving.
His project is sponsored by The US Library of Congress. It began in late 2009 with a hope that beside having too many good web archives, there are archives that are not on the Internet. Among this include various important libraries including the National Library Archives, the British Library and the California Digital Library.
Yet things are moving fast. Nelson said, "The space has opened up." Even the time is right for the project since bandwidth and storage is inexpensive. "We don't have to worry about storage space any more."
Memento is not at all a new archive, it is actually an archive of archives. Nelson commented, "The idea is that when I want to find a web page from a particular time, instead of bookmarking and searching, you can use the Memento add-on." His project has already began its work on a dozen of archiving centers currently.
If you are aware about the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of a web resource, the technical structure introduced by Memento enables you to view a version of that resource as it existed on some date initially by providing the desired date in a browser plug-in. Or you can in fact search the past Web by choosing a date and clicking away.
Regardless of what you select, you land upon versions of Web resources as they were around the chosen date. Anyhow, this will only work if previous versions are not available somewhere on the Web. However if they are, and are on servers then that help the Memento structure, you will get to them.
The project is currently in its early stage of development and is being worked upon. Nelson confirmed that, "We are trying to add more archives and develop better user interface. We are not saying that it is the most beautiful application but we are still working on it." This plug-in works with Mozilla Firefox at present but is expected to be launched for other famous browsers. The most crucial face of Memento is the 'time dimension' that is included in the software.
The Memento group is operating with National Libraries all over the US and also with libraries in Europe. They also operate with a bunch of archiving companies who are alive, such as a London-based commercial web archiving firm Hanzo.
At present, they not getting united with Internet content firms such as Google and Yahoo, however they are thinking about it in the near future. Nelson said in a statement, "It is not a compelling business reason for them to work with a project like this. Also, there are legal implications involved. What we are working is a rather small project." He would like to add a notion of time in a browser in order to let the Internet to explore the past as well for a user.