Conference Record

Where Slides Go to Die

The most common request after a talk is for the slides. The most common outcome is that nobody can find them eighteen months later, including the person who made them. A separate workplace-management angle can be explored through limbic resonance .

Reviewed August 9, 2026. For wider background, see SPARC .

The five destinations

The organiser's website. Uploaded after the event, linked from the programme, and gone when the domain lapses. For a per-edition conference domain this is a matter of a few years.

A slide-hosting platform. Convenient, and dependent on an account somebody maintains and a company that continues to exist in its current form.

An email attachment to whoever asked. Reaches five people and is unfindable by everybody else.

A repository. Durable, with a permanent address, and used by a small minority of speakers.

And your own storage, which is the only destination entirely under your control and the one most often assumed rather than verified.

Why slides are worse than papers

No publisher is involved. A paper in proceedings has an organisation whose business is maintaining it; slides have nobody.

They are treated as ephemera. The talk was the event; the slides were the support. Nobody plans preservation for a support material.

They are frequently large, which pushes them toward whatever hosting is free rather than whatever is durable.

And they are rarely cited, so no citation breaks when they vanish — which means the loss is invisible and nobody notices until they need them.

What is actually lost

Worth naming, because "slides disappeared" sounds minor.

The evidence that the talk happened, where the programme page went with the same site.

The content, in fields where slides are the only artefact because the conference publishes no proceedings and nothing was recorded.

Your own reference. A question arrives two years later about work you presented, and reconstructing what you said takes an afternoon you did not budget.

And the reuse. The next talk on the same subject starts from nothing rather than from a deck that existed.

The five-minute routine

Per talk, once, immediately afterwards.

Export a PDF. Not the source file alone — the software will change, and a PDF opens in fifteen years.

Put it in one folder with a consistent name: date, conference, title.

Deposit it in an institutional repository if you have one. Most accept presentations and most people never ask.

Screenshot the programme page showing your talk with the date. This is the item that becomes irreplaceable and it costs ten seconds.

And record the full citation while you have the details — event, dates, location, session.

For organisers

Cheap and rarely done.

Publish slides under the association's permanent domain, not the edition's.

Or deposit them once, as a set, in a repository with a mandate.

And ask speakers for a PDF rather than a link. A link ages; a file does not.

The whole intervention is a folder and a deposit, and it preserves the substantive output of an event that cost hundreds of people thousands of euros to attend.

The short version