abstract
- Traditionally, research results presented at scientific conferences are published in conference proceedings. Additionally, an increasing number of conferences are recorded and the videos are subsequently published. In most cases these videos are published by the organisers on commercial platforms or directly on the conference website. Therefore, a systematic search for conference recordings is difficult. Moreover, the videos are often lost after a short time 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. Finally, to ensure an unproblematic re-use of the material questions of licencing, technical quality and formats have to be solved in advance. 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. In this talk we describe how sharing scientific results via audio-visual media has become an important part of scientific communication and how conference recordings may complement the classical conference proceedings and add new value to the presented research. By discussing the whole process from pre-conference organisation to publishing and archiving the recordings we show pitfalls, best practices and opportunities of recordings for both conference organisers and participants.