Mink is a Google Chrome extension that uses the Memento protocol to indicate that a page a user is viewing on the live web has an archived copy and to give the user access to the copy. If no copies exist, the extension provides one-button access to preserve the page in various web archives and to easily view the page once it has been preserved.
- Seemlessly see how well-archived a live web page is while browsing.
- Using the interface, quickly navigate to past captures of the page and traverse available captures from multiple web archive.
- No captures? No problem! With a single button click, Mink will submit the web page you are currently viewing to multiple web archives.
- Too many captures? When the set gets large, Mink intutitively organizes the set of captures for easy, hierarchical, time-based selection.
- Go to the Chrome Web Store
- Click "Add to Chrome" to install Mink.
- Once installed, click the Mink icon in the Chrome toolbar to see how well-archived the current page is and navigate to the past.
The extension works by querying the archives when you browse the web. For each page you visit, Mink sends an asynchronous request to a Memento aggregator and displays the number of mementos (web pages for the URL in the archives) using a badge over the Mink/Memento icon in the browser's button bar.
For web pages with few mementos, the dropdown menu is the most accessible way to view the memento in a web archive (e.g., Internet Archive's Wayback Machine). To do this, click the Mink button bar icon, select the date/time from the dropdown and click the "View" button. When viewing a memento, selecting the icon again will return an interface that allows you to navigate to other mementos or quickly return to the live web.
If no mementos exist in the archive, the extension will indicate this with a red "no mementos" icon and give the option to submit the URL to various web archives for preservation.
Chrome supports debugging extensions by loading them from the local file system. To do this, go to Window > Extensions, enabled the Developer mode switch, click the Load unpacked button, and select the mink-plugin directory in the working directory clone of this repository.
For packaging the extension and releasing a new version, enter the mink-plugin directory, type
zip -r /where/to/store/resulting/mink.zip *
...access the Chrome Developer Dashboard and upload the .zip to the Mink entry.
Settings are available to customize Mink's functions and data retention including:
- Customizing the source of the Memento aggregator Memento aggregators.
- Tailoring the TimeMap caching setting for efficient querying.
- Defining Ignore Lists for sites where you don't want Mink to run.
To access these setting, right click on the Mink icon and select Options.
Contributions welcomed. Please see the CONTRIBUTING.md file in this repository for more information.
This project was originally presented at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Read the PDF) and can be cited as follows:
Mat Kelly, Michael L. Nelson, and Michele C. Weigle, "Mink: Integrating the Live and Archived Web Viewing Experience Using Web Browsers and Memento," In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), pages 469-470, London, England, September 2014.
@INPROCEEDINGS { kelly-dl2014-mink,
AUTHOR = { Mat Kelly and Michael L. Nelson and Michele C. Weigle },
TITLE = { Mink: Integrating the Live and Archived Web Viewing Experience Using Web Browsers and Memento },
BOOKTITLE = { Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) },
YEAR = { 2014 },
MONTH = { 9 },
ADDRESS = { London, UK },
PAGES = {469--470},
DOI = {10.1109/JCDL.2014.6970229}
}MIT