Openly Archiving Social Media Content
In 2014, the NCSU Libraries was awarded an
EZ Innovation Grant from the
State Library of North Carolina to develop a freely available web-based documentary toolkit that publicly documents our own effort to develop a sophisticated social media archival program in a way that may help guide cultural heritage organizations that are interested in collecting and curating social media content.
In order to develop accurate historical assessments, researchers must have access to primary materials that are represent a large and diverse set of participants. Social media platforms have become a venue where serious discourse and creation take place, but much of this critical and ephemeral content is lost to researchers as few institutions are collect and preserve this content.
The toolkit may aid cultural heritage organizations to:
- Develop collecting strategies for content such as official communication from their institution as well as crowdsourced communication from communities of interest
- Gain knowledge of how peer institutions have gone about collecting similar content
- Develop an understanding of the current and potential use of social media content by researchers
- Assess the legal and ethical implications of archiving social media content for future use by researchers
- Develop techniques for enriching collections at a minimal cost by taking advantage of harvesting interfaces provided by social media platforms
