Cultural Heritage Institutions Managing and Preserving Social Media
Creators:
Emily Blakowski and Monica Ponzini
Definition of Project
Libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions are preserving social media as expressions of their own communication and outreach strategies, and as historical and cultural heritage manifestations. These institutions may also help patrons create personal or community digital archives that include social media activity. In order to curate and preserve user-generated contents, cultural heritage institutions may adopt a variety of strategies, which often include the use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for harvesting data. Various challenges are associated with the preservation of social media and user-generated content. First and foremost, cultural heritage institutions must understand and define their new role in light of the possibilities and the type of contents provided by the social web and participatory practices. Other issues involved in the preservation of social media content include access, acquisition, authenticity, technical requirements, adherence to long-term digital preservation rules and regulations, and user privacy; therefore, criteria must be individuated in order to select, curate, preserve and make these contents accessible. Since the topic is constantly evolving, the articles taken into consideration date after 2010. We mainly conducted our searches on the databases Library Literature & Information Science Full Text, Library & Information Science Abstracts (LISA) and Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA). Additionally, we narrowed our queries using these terms: social media preservation AND challenges, digital preservation AND management, cultural heritage, social metadata and public-contributed content. This annotated bibliography contains a selection of articles which detail the role of cultural institutions in preserving and managing social media, social metadata or public-contributed content as expressions of cultural and community heritage.
Annotations
This article argues that archivists must confront the challenges of preserving and managing the social media of people who have died by adopting what the authors call a platform perspective. A platform perspective considers “the role that social media services play in the construction of personal archives… [and encourages creators and users] to consider how networked affordances from social media platforms provide new possibilities to memorialize and document events, people, and places,” (p. 9). Specifically, this viewpoint seeks to engage access privileges as well as current and future functionalities for the long term because they will administer future access to personal archives and documentation of networked cultures. It also emphasizes the transfer of information and preserving contexts of personal archives creation. In other words, a platform perspective takes in social media platforms holistically by accounting for the communities that create interpersonal archives and by ensuring access to those collections in the long run. In addition, Acker and Brubaker address issues facing archivists when preserving social media to multiple contexts of collection creation. These include representational and access limits due to the technological social media designs as well as the social media data reliance on networked resources and multiple data creators to preserve and maintain contextual integrity. They find that Facebook’s policies on memorial profiles do not fulfill the wishes of the deceased and its survivors because the ability to retrieve and access collections over time is not provided. Overall, a platform perspective is a comprehensive practice that archivists and librarians can use while preserving and managing social media as well as confronting issues surrounding archiving said social media.
Since Twitter has become an important means of social communication – and in some instances, for grassroots movements - digital archives are facing the need to preserve tweets as historical artifacts. Overall, the article provides an important reference for understanding, selecting and preserving material from Twitter. Taking the cue from the use of Twitter during the events that originated the so-called “Arab Spring”, the article outlines important points to consider in the development of a collection of tweets, such as the variability of data harvesting tools provided by Twitter, or the difficulty of evaluating the authenticity of tweets. The paper gives a summary of some of Twitter’s main functions, users’ behaviors, and use of the most common symbols. The authors examine how to aggregate the tweets using Twitter’s APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), and how to define the collection’s scope and selection strategies. Finally, the paper highlights how the archived set of tweets may differ from the actual online tweets and indicates how to archive a tweet collection following the Open Archive Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. Along with this valuable overview, the authors also provide numerous examples throughout the article and in the appendix at the end.
The article describes a series of strategies used by the group Activist Archivists to collect a large quantity of user-generated content (hosted in good part on various social media platforms) documenting the Occupy Movement. The author underscores the importance of acting early in the lifecycle of digital material, and of connecting with and providing guidelines for the users who are creating the contents. The article gives a very good overview of some of the main issues which can be encountered by an archiving entity when working on these kinds of materials: the lack of quality control of the digital material itself and of the metadata associated to it (such as time, date, location, context, authorship and rights), the inability of having direct control of the media platform hosting the materials, the difficulties of communicating with the creators of the materials and the organization of the selection process. Some of the proposed solutions, such as the promotion of Creative Commons licenses instead of formal donor agreements, or the creation of documents with best practices and guidelines for content creators and for content collectors, were implemented. Other approaches, such as crowd-sourcing part of the selection process of YouTube videos, or creating Apps that would automatically provide some metadata, remained at the project stage. Overall, this paper gives a very useful perspective on archival issues linked to born-digital user-generated material coming from a variety of sources.
Social media platforms have put creative power in the hands of common citizens, but how much of their social media creation will the general public proactively archive? This paper underscores how social media records can be valuable materials for cultural heritage and historical collections, yet, these contents can be threatened by several factors (e.g., the companies providing social media platforms can go out of business, new versions of social media platforms’ software can compromise validity and authenticity of files, or hinder accessibility) and therefore need to be systematically preserved. The author also emphasizes how archivists need to clearly understand how users approach social media in order to be better prepared to evaluate and preserve whatever kind of documents users may produce through these platforms and presents the findings of a study he conducted. The study is helpful in understanding how much users expect a platform such as Facebook to keep their documents, and how much they are willing to share personal data when they know they will be archived forever. The article indicates that Facebook users believe that the platform will keep their data long term, but do not expect it to archive their contents in perpetuity, and they are less likely to share data and images on Facebook if they believe their contents will be kept indefinitely. The author also concludes that archivists should not rely on users when it comes to preserving social media records.
The article explains how libraries can develop a pivotal role in co-creating born-digital community repositories with their own constituents by using user-generated content and social media. While social media platforms, such as Flickr, may become fortuitous thematic aggregators, they don’t have any interest in acting as preservation entities. The paper indicates that public libraries can fill this void and create collections, in collaboration with patrons, with user-generated content that would not only include the past, but also - and mostly - embrace the present. The author specifies that one of the main challenges that public libraries encounter in creating these collections is the scarcity of funding, and suggests involving the community in order to overcome this hindrance. The article suggests other valuable strategies that libraries can adopt in order to establish digital community archives: access open-source resources, collaborate with other libraries and organizations, and seek volunteers. According to the author, the scope of the collection should be defined by the community, using platforms such as Facebook as a starting point. The paper also indicates possible future developments: memory organizations can gather patrons’ social media contents through a voluntary registration process, and use them to create a community archive.
This article provides an in-depth example of how The National Archives preserved social media content through the UK Government Web Archive (UKGWA). Readers can discover information on how The National Archives and the Internet Memory Foundation (IMF) used API solutions to capture the public record for long-term preservation as it was published on Twitter and YouTube. The paper even provides solutions to a variety of issues that the project encountered. For example, to address legal issues surrounding capturing and preserving unwanted data, The National Archives only collected the Twitter and YouTube content of central government organizations, thus limiting the risk of capturing content not covered by the Crown Copyright and to keep that government data accessible over time. At the same time, the article tackles how the project enabled access to the archived content for efficient and effective management with an interface designed to resemble that of Twitter’s for the Twitter data and through JW Player for the YouTube content. On an interesting note, the article also discusses the social media archiving policies of institutions like The National Archives of Australia, the North Carolina State Archives, and the State Library of North Carolina. In summary, this source provides more concrete examples of the strategies used and issues faced by various archives around the world when preserving and managing social media.
Although this article speaks about social media preservation in the general sense, it gives a substantial amount on long-term digital preservation rules and regulations that libraries and archives could look to while managing social media information. For example, Article 19 of the Slovenian law the Protection of Documents and Archives and Archival Institutions Act (PDAAIA) states that “entities under public law and providers of services for the capture and storage of digital records are obligated to submit their internal rules for confirmation to National archives” (p. 266-267). These regulations and others primarily dictate how to manage digital content, but they can still apply to managing social media even though managing it effectively is still in the early stages. The authors also suggest that institutions like archives and libraries should develop internal rules for defining procedures for effective and efficient social media management and preservation as part of the overall long-term digital preservation strategy. These internal rules include choosing responsibility in managing digital content including social media records within an organization, establishing rules of evaluating digital records, selecting the methodology of risk management, creating certain rules of records management, implementing an information security management system, taking steps to ensure long-term digital preservation, and arranging a relation with external service providers (if needed). This article is useful in giving an overall view of the strategies and regulations used to manage social media content.
The widespread and seemingly uncontainable use of social media has created new typologies and a great quantity of social artifacts which need to be selected, curated and preserved in innovative ways. The article describes the results of a feasibility study aimed at evaluating possible issues connected to the digital preservation of noteworthy records gathered from social media, and provides a valuable reference for defining and archiving a social media “event”. The authors explain the rationale behind the definition of “event” in the real world and in the social media realm, with a focus on Twitter and more specifically its use of hashtags. A few examples help articulate the criteria used to define an “event” (either related to real-world events, such as the well-known #JeSuisCharlie, or taking place exclusively on social media, such as #PantiGate and #IonaSitComs, which became popular topics especially in Ireland). Finally, an account of the framework adopted for the study defines its four main stages: identification of “events”, selection and collection of meaningful Tweets through a web interface, annotation (with particular emphasis on location) and preservation.
Web 2.0 offers great opportunities for heritage institutions: promoting community engagement and enhancing the collections via user-generated contents are two of the main benefits. When using third-party social media platforms, though, institutions (big and small) are not willing or able to commit to some of their policies. This article is particularly helpful for institutions interested in joining a social media platform, inasmuch as it describes the experience of the Flickr Feasibility Study, a project created by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Digital Collections and Content (DCC). The paper illustrates the positive outcomes of the adoption of an aggregation model to join Flickr, and of the decision to use a Flickr Pro account and Creative Commons licensing rather than joining the Commons platform on Flickr. The authors exemplify the gains in terms of metadata gathering, and collection exposure and expansion, when utilizing a social media platform such as Flickr to connect with a wide community of users. This article demonstrates how users’ contributions, in particular, help institutions better evaluate and develop their collections, ultimately increasing their significance.
Social media can be used by cultural heritage institutions not only to promote participation and education, but also to gather contextual information on the collections, or even user-generated contents that will become part of the collections. The extent of this innovative interaction between cultural organizations and the public is the focus of the study described in the article. The author also portrays two very different case studies: the National Library of New Zealand (NLNZ) using the Flickr Commons platform to showcase its collections, and the community-driven digital repository of Kete Horowhenua using a self-hosted, Wiki-style application. The paper describes how the experience of the NLNZ, although successful, remained at a basic stage: while some users actively contributed to add information and context to the images posted online, the overall level of public interaction with the institution was limited. On the other hand, the article shows how the small community of Kete Horowhenua was able to create an active and truly participatory digital archive through a flexible platform, but also thanks to local, in-person engagement. Both scenarios are presented and analyzed in detail, making them useful examples for future developments.
With the advent of the social Web, cultural institutions have the opportunity of including the public in the creation of metadata and contents for their collections, reconsidering their functions within the field of heritage preservation. This paper describes the findings of a study centered on if and how these kinds of organizations gather, evaluate, moderate and include in their collections metadata and contents provided by users via social platforms, how much they value them and to what extent they factor in diversity and inclusivity. The study included libraries, archives and museums from all over the world, providing a valuable picture on the issues and viability of these new practices, a global and diverse perspective on the topic, and an interesting overview on how social metadata and public-contributed contents are perceived by the institutions’ professionals. In this sense, the study found that, while memory institutions seek some sort of participation from their community in creating public-contributed contents, often this kind of material is still considered peripheral and does not have an official place in the selection process or in the collections. After this analysis, the author suggests that memory institutions need to plan for this new wave of user-generated metadata and contents, and poses some open questions for further debate.
This paper reports findings from research done on how various archives and libraries around the world manage and preserve social media content as of 2015. It provides a good background to the topic because it establishes how a variety of archives and libraries have tried to control and sustain social media at that point. For instance, the survey showed that the sampled librarians and archivists expressed the importance of having explicit goals and objectives for managing their institutions’ social media, but many of them did not actually set them. Liew, King, and Oliver (2015) assert, “Establishing a formal vision is a feature of strategic planning which … is not to be expected of organizations that are still experimenting with social media” (p. 6). This shows that managing social media is still in its infancy. The same can be said with preserving social media. The survey asked the group “What steps has your organization taken to preserve the content generated by its social media activities?” (p. 8). Out of the 370 people who responded, 63 checked off that they did not take specific action to preserve said content, while 36 of them admitted that their “archival content is managed in a repository”, and 29 of them said that the selected content for retention is exported and harvested from social media channels (p. 8). This proves while social media is gaining notice as a preservation need, its preservation execution is still in the early stages. To summarize, this article delivers a good glimpse into how archives and libraries as of 2015 globally manage and preserve social media content.
This report details the development of an open source application called Social Feed Manager (SFM), which assists scholars in harvesting Twitter’s API for research and archiving social media content in a machine-readable form. Even though the SFM is applied within the academic setting, it can be applicable to libraries and archives as they attempt to harvest content from various social media platforms. Moreover, this article is rich in coverage of the pros and cons of harvesting API to collect social media data. The pros of doing so include structured data, API stability, and getting more metadata from the APIs than from the actual social media websites. Meanwhile, the cons include that not all social media platforms having complete and public APIs, that each data “is not readily human-viewable”, that no API is the same, that there is no accepted standard format for archival storage of social media data, and that there are explicit requirements and limits of using and sharing APIs per social media platform (p. 3). By giving the pros and the cons of API harvesting, the paper allows archivists and librarians to consider if they really want to harvest the API in order to their preserve social media content.
Even though this article discusses strategies that organizations can use to preserve social media, these strategies are applicable to archives and libraries. These practices include preserving not only the post itself, but also the links that are associated with it; using an open authoritative (oAuth) approach, which “provides an open standard for authorization that simplifies API”; and capturing the data in real time (p. 36). These practices permit libraries and archives to access the social media data and their provenance. Since Madhava is the founder and CEO of Nextpoint – a company that develops software applications -, he gives technical considerations for preserving social media like what setup or installation requirements are needed to preserve and enhance access as well as the use of robust search capabilities that will keep up with the increasing social media use. As with managing social media, Madhava suggests organizations need to develop workflows that will permit them to make copies and make them available on various platforms as well as schedules dictating how long to retain that data, especially for legal purposes. In addition, he talks about access issues, which can compromise the confidentiality and privacy of the information, as well as legal issues, as in organizations need to create strategies for executing legal holds due to social media being subjected to those holds. In summary, this article provides ways to preserve and manage social media for all organizations including archives and libraries as well as addresses technical considerations and access issues.
This paper gives an interesting viewpoint on how to approach the preservation of digital heritage generated through social media platforms. As a primary example, the article mentions the use that governments are making of social media in order to interact with the public, often without fully understanding the consequences in terms of preserving reliable digital heritage materials (from the range of the materials to legal and ethical consequences). Being such a multifaceted and open problem, and given the widespread use and the impossibility of a test period, the preservation of social media is an issue that, according to the authors, should be tackled as a “wicked problem” (as defined by Rittel and Webber) (p. 415). The authors also suggest that a first step to confront these hindrances can be a dialogue between information systems designers and archival professionals, and point in the direction of human-computer interaction as a possible area of productive cooperation.
To preserve and manage social media records, one must capture them first. Conducted by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), this white paper outlines the best strategies for capturing social media data for the sake of preservation. Even though these practices are for federal agencies, they are applicable to libraries and archives all around the country. For starters, the resource details the social media management policies of various federal institutions like NARA and the Smithsonian Institution. NARA addresses the ways that agencies could manage their social media through the following:
- “Using web crawling or other software to create local versions of sites[,]
- Using web capture tools to capture social media content and migrate to other formats[,]
- Using platform specific application programming interfaces (APIs) to pull content[,]
- Using RSS Feeds, aggregators, or manual methods to capture content[, and]
- Using tools built into some social media platforms to export content.” (p. 9-10).
This gives a solid framework on how to construct their social media management policies. Additionally, the source provides a list of capture tools and methods used by federal agencies as of May 2013 even though not many of them are specifically aimed to capture social media data for recordkeeping purposes. These include backup tools, asking vendors directly for the content, copying and pasting in a word-processing document, saving them in a PDF form, and through APIs. They also offer a table of available tools and software to assist libraries and archives for capturing and managing social media. The methods of capture are listed with the tools and software to display how they capture social media. One cannot preserve and manage social media without capturing it first, and this white paper delivers a great breadth of information regarding how to capture social media effectively and efficiently.
While this paper primarily discusses the issues on capturing and preserving digital documents, it spends a great deal on the challenges associated with capturing and preserving social media records. The authors divide these problems into three different aspects: social, technical, and legal. The social challenges section is especially important as it deepens our understanding of preserving and managing social media because it covers collection scope and content diversity. The article encourages librarians and archivists to create a collection scope of what social media data should be collected - in terms of subject, platform, and format - with community member input. Selecting which social media platforms is important because not all of them allow easy-archiving due to user account privacy settings. In general, the selection and appraisal are critical since it allows “communities to [connect to] heritage or academic institutions with preservation infrastructure, as opposed to collections existing solely on corporate platforms with no promise of sustainability” (2017). Like other data, social media records should be preserved within a context, and creating a collection scope helps to fulfill this. Additionally, using the example of the changes in the biking infrastructure in Indianapolis, the article urges that the social media selected for preservation should be diverse, as its subject matter expresses assent and dissent over the said subject. However, it also acknowledges the difficulty of preserving both sides due to the lack of opposing organizations, where social media can be more organized. Overall, this article is a highly useful resource for anybody looking for social issues regarding preserving and managing social media for libraries and archives.
This report provides a general overview of the practices used and challenges faced while preserving social media for long-term access in institutions like archives and libraries. Since social media is considered Web 2.0 or dynamic content, the report offers strategies to preserve it. These includes “harvesting data directly from platform APIs [Application Programming Interfaces], licensing API data from a third-party reseller, and in rare cases, negotiating an agreement directly with a commercial platform” (p. 9). APIs are used to preserve social media by providing the most complete and authentic record and by transferring the content and metadata to formats like JSON and XML. This report also deepens our understanding of the challenges that archives and libraries face while preserving social media. These issues include the restrictions imposed by commercial platforms if the institutions choose to negotiate a deal with them, copyright infringement, ensuring privacy and security for user information, selecting a post or the entire conversation, where to store social media content for long-term access, and ensuring long-term preservation due to susceptibility to potential loss. Even though preserving social media is still in its infancy, the report provides case studies like those from the collaboration between the NUI Galway and the Digital Repository of Ireland as well as The National Archives in the United Kingdom, that represent what work has been done within the last four years. Overall, this port provides a breadth of information about the practices and challenges when it comes to preserving social media in archives.
In this excerpt of a longer Digital Preservation Coalition study on the preservation of social media, the authors explore access problems with preserving social media in three different contexts: acquiring and capturing, processing and use, and sharing. For example, issues surrounding acquiring and capturing data through an API include social media platforms using rate limits of accessed data and protecting algorithms “used to generate the allowed sample size” (2015). Data creators and curators also face the problem of getting charged the amount of data accessed on various social media platforms as well as of verifying that the sample did not contain bias or misrepresenting information. While the bulk of this article is devoted to the access problems, it also offers solutions for long-term social media access. These include harvesting websites like the British Library and the National Library of Scotland have done as well as capturing data from public posts of official central government accounts like the UK Government Web Archive has done. The authors also suggest collaborations with other institutions to decide what social media data is captured and curated to enhance future use. In general, this article discusses access issues in depth and in different situations as well as offers solutions for long-term preservation for access to social media data.
This article describes in detail the challenges encountered by the pharaonic Twitter archive project undertaken by the Library of Congress and the obstacles that are making the repository still unavailable to the public. After giving a general overview of research issues related to Twitter (e.g., limitations of Twitter’s API, the great amount of data) and of the Twitter Archive project at the Library of Congress, the author mentions two main groups of problems to be considered in this case: one involving “practice” and the other concerning “policy” (para. 17). According to this paper, the issues involving practice include organization, processing, storage and searchability of a collection that is growing at a considerably rapid rate, while the problems connected to policy comprise factors such as regulating access to the contents, defining usage terms, and taking into consideration users’ privacy and capacity of managing their personal data. Both aspects are analyzed in detail in the article, providing a valid reference for library and information professionals who want to understand the complex ramifications of organizing, implementing and (hopefully) making accessible a digital repository of this magnitude.
