Managing Change in Distributed Collections Frank M. Shipman III Luis Francisco-Revilla Richard Furuta Center for the Study of Digital Libraries Texas A&M University

Walden’s Paths components Walden’s Paths System Organize, contextualize, and present materials selected from throughout the World- Wide Web Walden’s Path Manager Assist the maintainer of collections of Web- based resources by flagging significant change to collection items

Walden’s Paths System Off the path traversal Returning to the path On the path traversal

Walden’s Paths reader Original Web page Navigational controls Annotation

This is a problem everybody has: Bookmark lists Yahoo! Catalogues Meta-document applications such as Walden’s Paths Distributed digital libraries such as NSDL

Walden’s Path Manager Web-based collections (paths, bookmark lists, …) You can choose materials for collections but cannot control what happens to those materials subsequently Requires ongoing maintenance to counteract change

Change can be easy to detect… …but hard to understand Page not found/site not found/site unreachable Is this condition temporary or permanent? Has the material moved somewhere else? Where? Are there reasonable substitutes for this material? Page has changed Is this a change I care about? Do care: changes that change the rhetorical purpose of the page; reuse of URLs for other purposes… Don’t care: pages that are supposed to change (e.g., weather, news), grammatical corrections, ephemeral material such as site counters, …

View of change metrics

Walden’s Paths Project Web pages View example paths Create and view your own paths using the Web-based on-line authoring tool (registration required) Download the Walden’s Paths system components (prototype versions) for hosting on your own computer