The next speaker in this session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Catharina Ochsner, whose focus is on the archiving of scholarly blogs. Such blogs are engaged in science communication and thereby introduce more transparency into the scientific process; they exist in many different formats and across various major and minor platforms, and frequently link to each other and to other external resources.
But their long-term availability is limited, and depends on the blogger’s continued activity. There is a need for long-term archival of such resources in their original form, which also implies a categorisation of what blogs deserve such archiving.
A first exploration of the German scientific blogosphere shows that many such blogs are from the humanities and social sciences (hosted especially on the de.hypotheses.org platform, where blogs can receive a DOI and which is therefore also seen as guaranteeing long-term archival); the earliest of these started in the late 1990s. Some 64% have an institutional affiliation; these are also somewhat more likely to remain active.
More than a third of the blogs examined here even have an ISSN, and (potentially as a result of this) an entry in the German National Library catalogue. The vast majority of these blogs have an RSS feed, though these are sometimes difficult to find; this also facilitates the further archiving of blog posts. Some three quarters of the blogs had no copyright statement; the remainder used various Creative Commons licences.
There is a pressing need to further integrate such blogging practices into publication and archival infrastructures and other institutional frameworks, however.
