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Cemmento Addresses the Problem of Preserving Digital Annotations
George Williams

Here at ProfHacker, we're interested in digital tools for annotation. Over the years our authors have covered such tools as Google SideWiki, CommentPress and digress.it, Reframe It and Diigo, Scrible, and Hypothes.is. And as the comments to this post asking "How Do You Annotate in Your Class?" reveal, our readers are very interested in digital tools for annotation, too.

One sticking point with such tools, however, is that the annotations that are made on a published online may become useless if the design of the page where that document appears is changed: when that happens then the anchors to which the annotations are attached can move (or disappear), leaving the annotations unmoored. To address this problem, Alex Gil, Ben Armintor, and Martin Eve have created Cemmento, "a digital preservation tool for annotations."

How does it work? I'll let Martin explain…

Cemmento does the following:

When a URL is passed, it checks whether a version exists in the storage backend (in this case, the Internet Archive) with the querystring ?cemmento.

If a version does not exist, Cemmento requests the internet archive to store a copy.

Cemmento redirects the user to the earliest copy on the internet archive, using a Via service to automatically load a commenting/annotation engine (in this case, Hypothesis).

The project code is published on GitHub. As I understand it, the project is a work in progress, so don't expect Cemmento to accomplish everything you might want it to (or to work without any bugs). Speaking only for myself, a step-by-step tutorial on how best to use Cemmento would be great.

Have you experimented with Cemmento? What do you think? Alternately, how do you address the challenge of archiving annotations of online material? Please share in the comments.

[CC-licensed Flickr photo by Matt Cornock]