Feature Request: Show Memento Count for a URI-R

[machawk1]

I would like to suggest adding the ability for Memento count to be queried and displayed in a spreadsheet cell for a corresponding URI-R. A rudimentary approach would be to scrape a TimeMap for something akin to /rel=".*?memento.*?"/. As mentioned on Twitter, MemGator might be of help here (even if only configured to query a single archive), as it exposes an HTTP response header with this value:

$ memgator server &
$ $ curl -I localhost:1208/timemap/link/http://www.bl.uk
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Expose-Headers: Link, Location, X-Memento-Count, X-Generator
Content-Type: application/link-format
X-Generator: MemGator:1.0-rc7
X-Memento-Count: 14088
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2019 15:20:43 GMT

As an extended request, abstracting the "count" value (which can be problematic) to be capable of querying other facets of the mementos in the archive (e.g., how many are 200s or redirects) would make this project's novel use of spreadsheets even more useful for cases beyond its current capability.

Potential JS implementation source to adapt: https://github.com/jarofghosts/memento-client

[ibnesayeed]

When implemented, oduwsdl/MemGator#97 will be very helpful for features like this. However, the current state of this repo's code seems very simple and does not have a lot of custom processing in it.

[anjackson]

Can I clarify what the user need is? This add-on was initially created to answer a specific question that our curators needed to be able to ask: "Is this URL in that particular web archive?" They need to know this so they can make decisions about whether to add it to the UKWA collection.

Do we have people that need to know the global Memento count for a given URL?

[ibnesayeed]

I think the tool is good enough the way it is for the purpose it is built in mind with. That said, if more than one archives are being queried then it becomes an obvious thing to utilize Memento Aggregators to both utilize the work already done for web archives to inter-operate and embrace it further. Perhaps that's why we tend to suggest such whenever there is an opportunity, even before understanding the purpose and scope of a tool fully. Though, I feel that once the TimeMap Summary feature (described in oduwsdl/MemGator#97) is implemented, tools like these can benefit a lot as it can help curators quickly identify which archives have how many copies of the URI in question, time of the last captures in each archive, and temporal activity etc.

[anjackson]

Let me put this another way...

Adding full Memento API support and the ability to query the aggregator adds a LOT of new possibilities. But this is much more complex data with at least two axes (time v. archive), and all I've done so far is full a single cell with a single number.

So, what is the most useful thing we could do using this rich data source, and how would it work? Who would use it and what would they use it for?

(I've already had curators who want to be able to retrieve the date of the most recent copy held by us, for example, but I don't really need to use the full Memento API or the aggregator for that)