The campaign “Give new life to your poster” collects scientific poster presentations

The University of Tartu Library calls on all researchers, postgraduates and master’s students to preserve their scientific posters, presented at research conferences, by uploading them into the UT digital repository in DSpace. The library wishes to set up a new good practice of keeping all scientific posters in a single open access digital archive.

“Posters are becoming more and more popular at all kinds of conferences as they offer an ideal means for presenting the contents of a report or an exciting research find in a short and concise format,” said one of the initiators of the campaign, the Head of the Department of Subject Librarians Lilian Neerut. “After the conference, the posters are mostly left on the bottom shelves of the bookcases and the files are forgotten on the hard drives of the authors’ computers. These materials surely deserve a longer life as the posters could become perfect learning materials and information sources for others who are interested in the topic.”

Adding of their posters to the digital repository is very easy for the authors: they should fill in a short form on the library’s website with the main metadata and upload the file. “We will take care of everything else,” promised the digitisation specialist of the UT Library Jaana Mäesalu.  

The collected posters are, similarly to the university graduation theses, available to all under the CC licence in the UT digital repository in DSpace. To make the citing of the work easier, the authors can also apply for DOI or the permanent link for their poster.

“We really wish that it would not be just a flash campaign, but become a common practice for all researchers that after their conferences they would upload their posters by using this form,” added Mäesalu. “Posters are a part of the academic heritage and undoubtedly deserve to be preserved.”  

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