Current Research Projects
My research has been funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation,
Library of Congress, NASA and NSF. Since 2001, I have been PI
or Co-PI on 11 grants totaling more than $2.5M. The list below
covers the current, major projects but please see the publication list for more
details.
- The Open Archives
Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange ORE will develop specifications
that allow distributed repositories to exchange information about their
constituent digital objects. These specifications will include approaches
for representing digital objects and repository services that facilitate
access and ingest of these representations. The specifications will enable
a new generation of cross-repository services that leverage the intrinsic
value of digital objects beyond the borders of hosting repositories.
- The mod_oai project integrates
OAI-PMH semantics directly into the Apache webserver. Using the notion
of resource harvesting, mod_oai allows the entire web resource to be
harvested, not just the descriptive metadata. Initial results accessing
a departmental web site using both web crawling and mod_oai harvesting
techniques show that harvesting provides comparable performance to
crawling when accessing a web site for the first time, and significant
speed increases when updates are considered. We are also exploring the
use of MPEG-21 DIDLs to disseminate "preservation ready" representations
of web resources. This project is joint with the LANL Research Library
and funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Some test links for this
research: http://oducrate.gotdns.com/index.html,
http://crate.gotdns.com/index.html,
http://blanche-00.cs.odu.edu/, and
http://blanche-02.cs.odu.edu/.
- Lazy
Preservation uses the Web Infrastructure (commercial
search engines, Internet Archive and research projects) to reconstruct lost web sites.
The purpose of lazy preservation is not to replace backup strategies
and disaster planning, but it does offer a surprising good safety net
for recovering sites after a catastrohpic event. We are investigating
descriptive models ("how much do you get if you do nothing?") as
well as prescriptive and predictive models. This research is
funded by the NSF. We have set up a test repository, called the Monarch Repository, to test
certain features of lazy preservation.
Annual Reports
