Catharina Ochsner | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

The Future of Scholarly Blogs: Scholarly Bloggers' Perspectives on Long-Term Preservation

Scholarly blogs are an important venue for scholarly communication, however they are not yet integrated into the preservation workflows of digital research and information infrastructures, which places their long-term access at risk. By using Star and Ruhleder's (1996) dimensions of information infrastructure as a theoretical framework, in this study we investigate social and organizational factors that impact blog preservation and derive implications for the implementation of blogs into an information infrastructure. We conducted and qualitatively analyzed 13 semi-structured interviews with scholarly bloggers to identify bloggers' perceived challenges concerning blog preservation and their requirements an information infrastructure tasked at preserving scholarly blogs. We found that participants named or indirectly described existing infrastructure institutions and their services that are already working towards preserving the scholarly record. The findings suggest extending the scope of existing infrastructure institutions to include scholarly blog preservation.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2026

Requirements for a cooperative information infrastructure for the digital preservation of scholarly blogs

The long-term accessibility and reusability of scholarly knowledge is a central concern of Open Science. Research and infrastructure development in this area have so far focused predominantly on how traditional scientific outputs, such as journal articles, monographs, and conference proceedings, can be preserved and made openly available over time. Alternative forms of scholarly communication such as scholarly blogs, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention, even though they have become an established medium for disseminating research and for fostering dialogue within academia and with the wider public. The lack of preservation of scholarly blogs puts them at a risk of information loss, which poses the threat of leaving a gap in the scholarly record. Prior research has examined how blogs are integrated into information infrastructures and what requirements scholarly bloggers have for an information infrastructure that ensures long-term access to their blogs. What is needed now are recommendations for the implementation of these results into the library practice. Based on a convergent mixed-methods design that merges a quantitative analysis of 866 German scholarly blogs, a qualitative interview study with 13 scholarly bloggers, and an open, participatory review process with the scholarly blogging community, we propose a catalog of requirements for the integration of scholarly blogs into information infrastructures in order to ensure their long-term accessibility, reusability and citeability.

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