A video is worth a thousand (conference) talks

A recent qualitative survey among conference hosts and organizers shows that there is a growing interest in conference recordings. But as I have written earlier here, no sustainable standard for handling these recordings has been established yet. Accordingly, it is reported that the whole process of recording of conference talks is often a very tedious task. To support conference organizers with this task, TIB set up a new conference recording service that was first introduced at last week’s Leibniz MMS Days.

Conferences play a crucial role when it comes to communicating scientific results. However, the audience of conference talks is in general limited to a very small circle of people from the same field of research. If no conference proceedings are published, it is even limited to those which are present at the conference, the particular session and talk. You may still publish your slides on figshare or SlideShare (or similar platforms) but the additional information you provide in your talk can only be enjoyed by those attending the conference. And even those often have to choose between talks given at the same time in parallel sessions. Conference recordings on the other hand may reach a large audience not only from the same research area but across disciplines and even interested lay people.

However, recording and publishing conference talks can be a very tedious task for conference organizers. In most cases scarce financial and human resources as well as a lack of technical expertise complicate the project. Conference recordings mean a lot of extra work before, during and after the conference. Speakers have to agree on the recording and publication (ideally under an open access license) of the talks. The technical equipment has to be set up. The talks have to be recorded, edited and published. The recordings should be findable and accessible after publication and, at best, receive a DOI and be digitally preserved.

In most cases a reliable infrastructure is missing. Therefore, license information, persistent identifier and digital preservation are rarely part of the publishing process. On the other hand, TIB already provided advisory services on Open Access, publishing service and digital preservation of conference recordings within the TIB AV-Portal. Moreover, the semantic search within the spoken and written language increases the findability of the videos. So far, the only step in the process chain not covered by TIB has been the recording of the videos. This gap is filled by the new conference recording service. This allows TIB to cover the whole process from planning to publishing conference recordings.

Last week, the new service was first used during the Leibniz MMS Days in Leipzig. The MMS Days are the annual event of the Leibniz Network „Mathematical Modeling and Simulation (MMS)„. In the Leibniz Network MMS, 28 Leibniz institutes from all sections of the Leibniz Association are represented. The network is coordinated by the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics, Berlin (WIAS) that also hosted the first MMS Days in 2016. Last year the MMS Days were hosted by TIB and recorded for the first time (Videos of MMS Days 2017). As the TIB conference recording service did not yet exist, the recordings were taken by our colleagues from ZQS/elsa at the Leibniz University Hanover. This year the MMS Days were hosted by the Leibniz Institute of Surface Modification, Leipzig (IOM) and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research, Leipzig (TROPOS). The recordings are now available in the AV-Portal, continuing the series of recordings of MMS Days.

Bastian Drees

... arbeitet im Kompetenzzentrum für nicht-textuelle Materialien (KNM).