Research results presented at scientific conferences are valuable information resources for scientific communities. Traditionally, the results are published in conference proceedings, documenting the current state of research. Additionally, an increasing number of conferences are recorded and the videos are subsequently published. While libraries have well-established procedures for collecting textual conference reports as part of the difficult-to-obtain grey literature, comparable procedures for audio-visual conference recordings have not yet been established.
In most cases these videos are published by the organisers on commercial platforms or directly on the conference website. A systematic search for conference recordings is difficult e.g. because the URL changes or external links lead to nowhere. Usually, conference websites are not maintained on a long-term basis and commercial platforms may remove videos or change the conditions for access for a variety of reasons.
In order to prevent the loss of conference recordings the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) has developed the AV-Portal. The AV-Portal provides the ideal infrastructure to host, find and reuse scientific videos. It’s a single access point for videos from different conferences and years. All videos are assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). These persistent identifiers allow for reliable referencing both as stable online links and as correct citations in scholarly work.
This paper describes how sharing scientific results via audio-visual media has become an important part of scientific communication. Further the paper introduces the TIB AV-Portal as a trusted home for conference recordings. It describes the workflow for linking the recordings to the corresponding proceedings in TIB’s extensive collection of conference reports and vice versa via DOIs, thereby fulfilling a key demand of the Pisa Declaration on Policy Development for Grey Literature Resources.
