Herbert Van de Sompel

Digital Librarian

The Web's Missing Dimension: Time
44 minutes, 20.3mb, recorded 2010-04-14
Herbert Van de Sompel

Herbert Van de Sompel is a digital librarian who wonders why the web has no memory, and wants to do something about that. In this conversation he tells host Jon Udell about the Memento project, a proposed protocol that browsers can use to scroll through historical versions of web resources.


Herbert Van de Sompel graduated in Mathematics and Computer Science at Ghent University (Belgium), and in 2000 obtained a Ph.D. in Communication Science there. For many years, he headed Library Automation at Ghent University. After leaving Ghent in 2000, he was Visiting Professor in Computer Science at Cornell University, and Director of e-Strategy and Programmes at the British Library. Currently, he is the team leader of the Prototyping Team at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Team does research regarding various aspects of scholarly communication in the digital age, including information infrastructure, interoperability, digital preservation and indicators for the assessment of the quality of units of scholarly communication. Herbert has played a major role in creating the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse & Exchange specifications (OAI-ORE), the OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services, the SFX linking server, the bX scholarly recommender service, and info URI. Currently, he works with his team on the Open Annotation and Memento (time travel for the Web) projects. More information is available at <http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/>.

This free podcast is from our Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators series.

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