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

TL;DR

This study explores German scholarly bloggers' perspectives on long-term preservation, highlighting their needs, concerns, and the call for a decentralized infrastructure to support sustainable scholarly blogging.

Contribution

It provides qualitative insights into bloggers' preservation challenges and proposes a decentralized infrastructure model tailored to their diverse requirements.

Findings

Bloggers see a lack of institutional support for blog preservation.

Heterogeneous requirements include persistent identifiers and metadata.

Concerns about reliance on non-European platforms and distrust of centralized infrastructures.

Abstract

Scholarly blogs have become an important venue for scholarly communication, yet they remain insufficiently integrated into digital research and information infrastructures, which places their long-term preservation and citability at risk. This study investigates what challenges German scholarly bloggers perceive concerning blog preservation and what requirements they articulate for a sustainable information infrastructure. Drawing on Star and Ruhleder's (1996) dimensions of information infrastructure as a theoretical lens, we conducted and qualitatively analyzed 13 semi-structured interviews with scholarly bloggers. The analysis reveals three connected themes. First, bloggers perceive a structural deficit in institutional responsibility and support: the long-term preservation of blogs is not systematically assumed by libraries, universities, or platforms, while bloggers are not sufficiently supported by their affiliated institutions. Second, bloggers articulate heterogeneous requirements like persistent identifiers, structured metadata, technical interoperability, and organizational sustainability. Third, governance preferences are characterized by distrust toward commercial and public infrastructures, compounded by concerns about geopolitical dependencies on non-European platforms. These findings demonstrate that no single centralized infrastructure can adequately address the diverse and context-dependent needs of bloggers. We argue for a decentralized information infrastructure for scholarly blogs and offer concrete recommendations for information infrastructure facilities, platform providers, bloggers and research performing organizations.