Research Library team wins 2010 Digital Preservation Award

December 9, 2010—Herbert Van de Sompel, Robert Sanderson, Lyudmila Balakireva, and Harihar Shankar of the Laboratory's Research Library and collaborators at Old Dominion University (Michael Nelson and Scott Ainsworth) have won the 2010 Digital Preservation Award for Memento, a framework for time travel on the web.

Memento is fully aligned with the architecture of the World Wide Web and uses a basic feature embedded in the HTTP protocol to direct users to archived copies of a website through their browser.  This “web with a memory” opens web archives in a dramatic new way, by actually connecting them with the current websites and allowing users to browse the web of the past by selecting a date and clicking to land on a previous version available somewhere in a web archive.

Changing and updating pages is one of the web’s greatest advantages, but each time a new page (or part of a page) is changed, the previous version disappears. For more than a decade, services such as the Internet Archive and the UK Web Archive have worked to archive the internet and web to prevent digital content from disappearing. However, users had no way of linking between the current web and earlier versions held by web archives. 

Memento offers a solution by letting users set a time preference in their browser (a Memento plug-in developed for the project is available for Firefox and a similar tool is being reviewed by Microsoft for inclusion in IE). Deploying basic HTTP content-negotiation tools already embedded in the architecture of the web enables users to go back in time to an archived version. Memento has been adopted internationally by significant web archives. Van De Sompel led the team to develop Memento, and the project was funded in part by the U.S. Library of Congress.

The Digital Preservation Award is an international recognition that celebrates the excellence and innovation that will help to ensure that digital memory is available in the future. The Digital Preservation Coalition sponsors the Digital Preservation Award, one of a set of five awards that are collectively called the Conservation Awards. The Conservation Awards began in 1991, coordinated by the Institute for Conservation (ICON). 

The Digital Preservation Award has been given three times previously, most recently in 2007. The Pilgrim Trust, the Digital Preservation Coalition, the Anna Plowden Trust, and Sir Paul McCartney support the awards, which are managed in partnership by key organizations in conservation, restoration, and preservation management. The goal of the award is to preserve the digital legacy and to prevent a “digital dark age,” which could occur as current formats and technology became obsolete.