CNI Spring 2017 Membership Meeting

Over the past years, scholars have started using a wide variety of online portals to conduct aspects of their research and to convey research results. These portals exist outside of the established scholarly publishing system and can be dedicated to scholarly use, such as experiment.org, or general purpose, such as SlideShare. The combination of productivity features and global exposure offered by these portals attracts researchers and they happily deposit scholarly artifacts there. But history has shown that even popular web platforms can disappear without a trace. Also, they rarely provide any explicit archival guarantees; many times quite the opposite.  Whereas initiatives such as LOCKSS and Portico have emerged to make sure that the output of the established scholarly publishing system gets archived, no comparable efforts exist for scholarly artifacts deposited in these online platforms. A recently started Andrew W. Mellon funded project, explores how these scholarly orphans could be archived. Because of the scale of the problem - the number of platforms and artifacts involved - the project starts from a web-centric archival paradigm inspired by web archiving. Because the artifacts are often times created by researchers affiliated with an institution, the project focuses on tools for institutions to identify and archive these artifacts. This project briefing will introduce the problem domain. It will provide an insight into the approach that is explored for discovering artifacts that were deposited in portals, capturing them, and ingesting them into an institutional archive. The wide range of research challenges involved in conducting these tasks will be detailed and early results will be shared.