Dear DM Community;

I write on behalf of the Digital Medievalist Executive Board.

The Digital Medievalist has recently created a curated Zenodo community, called the Digital Medieval Webinar Repository (DMWR) to house recorded presentations on medieval topics, especially those that include digital work. We already have several videos posted and ready for the community to access, and invite additional submissions to our growing collection.

As we launch this initiative, we hope to demonstrate the power of the DMWR for both scholars who have given virtual presentations at conferences or other organized venues, and for organizations who have hosted medieval scholarly presentations and recorded those events.

When scholars post to the DMWR community, they are following the best practices for digital preservation that encourage storing materials in multiple locales. Moreover, the retrieval and citation of a scholar's work is facilitated by the generation of a DOI and standard citation of the recorded presentation, and other members of the community can see, access, and search for their work within the curated collection.

When organizations post in the DMWR, they ensure the safekeeping of their contributors' work and create a public recall to the sponsored event. Contributions include a reference to the event for easy discovery, and should the organization's site ever fail, event participants can rest assured that back-up copies are stored in the DMWR collection for easy retrieval.

The DMWR program is a win-win; the community benefits by having a central location where materials of interest to medievalists are stored, and scholars and organizations can feel confident that others can find, access, and cite their recorded work appropriately. 

Cataloguing a recording is a simple affair, and once the materials are gathered, it should take no longer than 10 minutes. Each contribution requires three things:

1. An MP4 file of the recording;

2. A transcript of the presentation in pdf format (automatically generated in youtube, for example);

3. All standard bibliographic information to generate the citation and tag the recording.

Members of the Digital Medievalist Board are happy to answer questions for posters. Uploading to Zenodo is not all that complicated, but please do reach out if there are problems or concerns.

Thank you for your support of the Digital Medievalist, and please feel free to circulate this call to anyone who might find it of interest.

Laura Morreale