Tuesday 8th August 2006 - Oakland (California Digital Library)

Packed up my gear, bought some breakfast at the hotel (the servings are always so oversized!) and checked out of the hotel.

Caught a cab to the CAL-Train station. Then caught the CAL-Train from San Jose station to San Francisco, then caught another cab to the BART station. Caught a BART train over to Oakland (it's not far between SF and Oakland) and then located the California Digital Library.

I've now met with John Kunze and many of his staff. I've had a meeting this afternoon with Tracy Seneca who is managing the Web Archiving section of the California Digital Library. We talked about web archiving in general and I asked to focus on the models that might be in use and I'll see how I can apply these more generally. As part of their web archiving project they're working in collaboration with a few Universities [names to be added later - I don't have my notepad with me as it's back in my room]. They're also using the Internet Archive's Heratrix crawler to do the crawls.

The issues that i found the most interesting are the ones associated with what defines a "website". It's much like our discussions about what defines a "work". These are basically conceptual/philosophical issues and then applying them practically to try and solve this problem is an interesting one. Is a website just the pages found within the one URL or domain, or is it the pages that seem to be associated with eachother (even if they cross to another domain), or does it include all the other pages that hang off a site aswell. So essentially is the whole website just the individual pages (without any links or context) or does it need to be in context? It really is an interwoven net and hard to isolate as a single "thing".

I also read a document on a proposal for a new resolver service that will be offered - Name to Thing (N2T). Basically it's a universal service that assists in keeping persistence for the longterm. Where the downfall of PIs are could be seen as the domain name and when this changes... then what? So this is a proposed simple solution to this problem.

I've also been working on a powerpoint (thanks to Monica Berko and Gerard Clifton's previous powerpoints) as I have to give a presentation on the NLA from 10.30am - 11.30am tommorrow. I'll be talking briefly about what we have done (DOSS, DCM, PIs, Delivery Systems, Discovery Services etc) what we're interested in doing in Digital Preservation (building a digital preservation workflow system) and what some of our issues are (range of formats, range of carriers) and the questions that we have (what solutions are their for the "complex" objects).

Walked back to the hotel after finishing up around 6.30pm at the CDL. I was advised to walk down Franklin St rather than Broadway (where the BART train stations are) as the area is a bit rough. I seemed to be hastled just as much on Franklin as I was on Broadway. Its a very different place to either San Jose or San Francisco. Oakland is very much like Newcastle. A few buildings boarded up on the main street and a more hard-edged feel to the place. Would've liked to have taken some photos but was alreaady getting attention walking along with my gear - so I'll leave that to another day.

For now, some photos from the room....





I'm feeling pretty unwell with this cold so am going to grab some food in the hotel, finish off the powerpoint quickly and climb into bed.