I think being able to access the version of a resource as it was at a prior time is an important aspect of the citation process (hence WebCite, for example, or the retained earlier versions in Wikipedia). So i think Memento potentially has a place in the scholarly process.
What the role of Memento should be in relation to repositories, I'm less sure. In particular, if the repository grows by addition rather than by change then I don't see a huge advantage. I think I mean here that if the repository's documents are regarded as fixed, then you don't need to show changes to them. (This might not be true in certain preservation cases, of course, in relation to technology changes and obsolescence, but it's not clear how Memento would survive such a world either).
I can imagine other kinds of repositories (for example, data repositories) where change might be more likely to occur. These use cases might need a little further analysis before one would be confident that a service like memento would be helpful, but it feels like they/it should be!
--
Chris Rusbridge
Director, Digital Curation Centre
Email: [log in to unmask] Phone 0131 6513823
University of Edinburgh
Appleton Tower, Crichton St, Edinburgh EH8 9LE
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
On 15 Feb 2010, at 11:53, Leslie Carr wrote:
> Have you heard of Memento, one of Herbert van de Sompel's recent projects.
>
> "Have you ever felt frustrated by your inability to get to old versions of Web pages? Did you bookmark a page last year, and revisited it recently only to find that the current content isn't even remotely related to what caught your interest back then? ... Wouldn’t it be much easier if you could just connect to cnn.com, Wikipedia, or news.bbc.co.uk indicating that you are interested in the pages of March 20 2008, not the current ones? If you could activate a time machine in your browser or bot?" (http://www.mementoweb.org/)
>
> We (EPrints) have been asked to think about providing support for this facility in our repository software, but we'd like to get some feedback from the community.
>
> Would this be useful to anyone? What use cases can you foresee? Indeed, have you ever felt frustrated by the lack of this facility, as the project page assumes?
> --
> Les Carr
>
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