TAMIDS Tech Talk: Martin Klein: We Are Losing our Scholarly Record – and What We Can Do About It

Speaker: Martin Klein, Ph. D., Scientist, Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory

Faculty Host: Sarah Potvin, ENGL

Abstract: Dissemination of scholarly knowledge has dramatically changed because we are able to publish, access, and share information on the web. While this environment comes with a myriad of opportunities, it also poses challenges, specifically to the longevity of and continued access to the web-based scholarly record. Increasingly, as authors of scientific articles, we reference resources on the web such as project websites, scholarly wikis, ontologies, datasets, source code, presentations, blogs, and videos. While these resources are referenced to provide essential context for the presented research, they are, just like any other web resource, subject to the dynamic nature of the web and hence likely to disappear or significantly change over time. While there is no orchestrated preservation infrastructure in place for such “web at large” resources, there are steps we can take to support the longterm availability and access of web-based scholarly artifacts. In this talk I will briefly highlight the notion of reference rot on the web, provide indicators of its ubiquity and significance, and outline ways to address it. I will demonstrate services and implementations – some of which originated at LANL – that are designed to support authors, archivists, librarians, publishers, and others to become better stewards of digital scholarship.

Biography: Martin Klein is a scientist and lead of the Prototyping Team in the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In this role he focuses on research and development efforts in the realm of web archiving, scholarly communication, digital system interoperability, and data management. He is involved in standards and frameworks such as Memento, ResourceSync, Signposting, and Robust Links. Martin holds a Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Applied Sciences Berlin, Germany and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Old Dominion University. More information is available at: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0130-2097.

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For more information about TAMIDS Seminar Series, please contact Ms. Jennifer South at jsouth@tamu.edu