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Showing posts from April, 2017

2017-04-26: Discovering Scholars Everywhere They Tread

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Though scholars write articles and papers, they also post a lot of content on the web. Datasets, blog posts (like this one), presentations, and more are posted by scholars as part of scholarly communications . What if we could aggregate the content by scholar, instead of by web site? Why would we want to do this? We can create stories, or collections of a scholar's work in an interface, much like Storify . We can also index this information and create a search engine that allows a user to search by scholar and find all of their work, not just their published papers, as is offered by Scopus or Web of Science, but their web-based content as well. Finally we can archive their work before the ocean of link rot washes it away. To accomplish our goal, two main questions must be answered: (1) For a given scholar, how do we create a global scholar profile describing the scholar and constructed from multiple sources? (2) How do we locate the scholar's work on the web and use this

2017-04-24: Pushing Boundaries

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Since the advent of the web, more elements of scholarly communication are occurring online . A world that once consisted mostly of conference proceedings, books, and journal articles now includes blog posts, project websites, datasets, software projects, and more. Efforts like LOCKSS , CLOCKSS , and Portico preserve the existing journal system, but there is no similar dedicated effort for the web presence of scholarly communication . Because web-based scholarly communication is born on the web, it can benefit from web archiving . This is complicated by the complexity of scholarly objects. Consider a dataset on the website Figshare , whose landing page is shown in Fig. 1. Each dataset on Figshare has a landing page consisting of a title, owner name, brief description, licensing information, and links to bibliographic metadata in various forms. If an archivist merely downloads the dataset and ignores the rest, then a future scholar using their holdings is denied context and addit