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.
The extension is available for download from the Chrome Web Store!
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 a different interface with a button to 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 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.
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