PIDapalooza 2019

The Scholarly Orphans project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, explores technical approaches aimed at capturing and archiving scholarly artifacts that researchers deposit in web productivity portals as a means to collaborate and communicate with their peers. These artifacts are not collected by other frameworks aimed at archiving the scholarly record (e.g., LOCKSS, Portico, Institutional Repositories) and are only incidentally captured by web archives. The project explores an institution-driven approach inspired by web archiving. To demonstrate the ongoing thinking, the project has devised an experimental automated pipeline that continuously discovers, captures, and archives artifacts. These are created by actual researchers who, for the purpose of the experiment, were virtually enlisted in a fictive research institution. A portal at myresearch.institute provides an overview of the artifacts that were discovered and provides access to archived versions stored in both an institutional and a cross-institutional archive. The set-up leverages a range of  technologies that share a flavor of persistence: Memento, Memento Tracer, Robust Links, Signposting.