The future of scholarly blogs: Scholarly bloggers' perspectives on long‐term preservation

Abstract Scholarly blogs are an important venue for scholarly communication; however, they are not yet integrated into the preservation workflows of digital research and information infrastructures, which places their long‐term access at risk. By using Star and Ruhleder's (1996) dimensions of information infrastructure as a theoretical framework, in this study we investigate social and organizational factors that impact blog preservation and derive implications for the implementation of blogs into an information infrastructure. We conducted and qualitatively analyzed 13 semi‐structured interviews with scholarly bloggers to identify bloggers' perceived challenges concerning blog preservation and their requirements for an information infrastructure tasked with preserving scholarly blogs. We found that participants named or indirectly described existing infrastructure institutions and their services that are already working toward preserving the scholarly record. The findings suggest extending the scope of existing infrastructure institutions to include scholarly blog preservation.