The Dark and Stormy Archives Project

Martin Klein, a LANL Scientist in the Research Library at LANL and New Mexico Consortium affiliate, along with Shawn M Jones, a PhD student and Graduate Research Assistant at LANL have been working on a project titled “The Dark and Stormy Archives”.  The project is lead by their collaborators at Old Dominion University and is in collaboration with the National Library of Australia.

The goal of this project is to collect and preserve the internet for future generations. This project works to the develop the Dark and Stormy Archives (DSA) toolkit so that it will be applicable to all Memento-compliant web archives. What is the DSA toolkit exactly? The DSA Toolkit is a tool to improve the summarization, abstracting, understanding, and sharing of collections of archived web pages.

How does it work? The DSA toolkit implements “storytelling” techniques to summarize archival collections by choosing a small number of ideal pages from the collection that best illustrate what the collection is about.

The scientists working on this project believe this is the best process since if one were to collect metadata about all pages in the collection, the conventional user interface will quickly become overwhelmed by too much data. This project shows the potential of summarizing the collection with a small number of pages selected from the collection. The varying story and collection types influence which pages are selected and how they are arranged.

The researchers hope this project will provide the additional insight needed to develop future standards that enable sharing collection information.

This project is funded by the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC).

To learn more about this project see: https://netpreserve.org/projects/dark-and-stormy-archives/