A Vision of the Library’s Role in Archiving Scholarly Artifacts (Invited Presentation)

Increasingly, scholars of all disciplines are using a wide variety of online portals such as GitHub, FigShare, and SlideShare to conduct aspects of their research and to convey research results. However, these portals, whether dedicated to scholarly use or general purpose, exist outside of the established scholarly publishing system and no infrastructure exists to systematically and comprehensively archive the deposited artifacts. Most often, institutions are not even aware of the existence of these artifacts created by their researchers.

This talk will report on first explorations on how these scholarly artifacts could automatically be archived. Because the artifacts are often created by researchers affiliated with an institution, we focus on tools for institutions to discover, capture, and archive these artifacts. We are convinced that without adequate infrastructure, scholarly artifacts will vanish from the web in much the same way regular web resources do. We therefore hope that this work will help raise awareness regarding the problem and contribute to the discussion of the library’s role in systematically archiving web-based scholarly artifacts in a sustainable and scalable manner.