Conference Agenda

Social media are increasingly replacing other forms of communication. In doing so, they are also becoming an important source to archive in order to preserve the diverse voices in society for the long term. However, few Flemish archival institutions currently archive this type of content. To remedy this situation, a number of private archival institutions in Flanders started research on sustainable approaches and methods to capture and preserve social media archives. Confronted with the complex reality of this new landscape however, this turned out to be a rather challenging undertaking.

Through the lens of our project 'Best practices for social media archiving in Flanders and Brussels', we’ll look at the lessons learned and the central challenges that remain for social media archiving in private archival institutions in Flanders. Many of these lessons and challenges transcend this project and concern the broader web archiving community and cultural heritage sector.

Unsurprisingly, to a lot of (often smaller) private archival institutions in Belgium archiving social media remains a major challenge either because of a lack of (new) digital archiving competencies or the availability of (often expensive and quickly outdated) technical solutions in heritage institutions. On top of that, there are major legal challenges. For one, these archives cannot fall back on archival law or legal deposit law as a legal basis. In addition, the quickly evolving European and national privacy and copyright regulations form a maze of rules and exceptions they have to find their way in and keep up with.

One last stumbling block is proving particularly hard to overcome. It concerns the legal and technical restrictions the social media platforms themselves impose on users. These make it practically impossible for heritage institutions to capture and preserve the integrity of social media content in a sustainable way. We believe this problem is best to be addressed by the international web archiving, research and heritage community as a whole.

This is only one of the recommendations we’re proposing to improve the situation as part of the set of ‘best practices’ we developed and which we would like to present here in more detail.

Social media archiving in cultural heritage and government is still at an experimental stage with regard to organizational readiness for and sustainability of initiatives. The many different tools, the variety of platforms, and the intricate legal and ethical issues surrounding social media do not readily allow for immediate progress and uptake by organizations interested or mandated to preserve social media content for the long term.

In Belgium and the Netherlands, the last three years have seen a series of promising projects on building social media archiving capacity, mostly focusing on heritage and research. One of their most important findings is that the multiple needs and requirements of successful social media archiving are difficult for any one organization to tackle; efforts to propose good practices or establish guidelines often run onto the reality of the many and sometimes clashing priorities of different domains e.g. archives, libraries, local and national government, research. Faced with little time and increasing costs, managers and funders are generally reluctant to support social media archiving as an integral part of collecting activity, as it is seen as a nice-to-have but not crucial part of their already demanding core business.

Against this background, we set out to bring together representatives of different organizations from different sectors in Belgium and the Netherlands to research the possibilities for what a distributed collaborative approach to social media archiving could look like, including requirements for sharing knowledge and experiences systematically and efficiently, sharing infrastructure and human and technical resources, prioritization, and future-proofing the initiative. In order to do this, we look into:

• Wishes, demands, and obstacles to doing social media archiving at different types of organizations in Belgium and the Netherlands?

• Aligning the heritage, research, and governmental perspectives

• Learning from existing collective organizational structures

• First steps for the allocation of roles and responsibilities

Through interviews with staff and managers of interested organizations, we want to find out if there is potential in thinking about social media archiving as a truly collaborative venture. We would like to discuss the progress of this research and the ideas and challenges we have come up against.

Perma.cc is a project of the Library Innovation Lab, which is based within the Harvard Law School Library and exists as a unit of a large academic institution. Our work has been focused in the past mainly on the application of web archiving technology as it relates to citation in legal and scholarly writing. However, we also have spent time exploring expansive topics in the web archiving world - oftentimes via close collaboration with the Webrecorder project - and most recently have built tools leveraging new client-side playback technology made available by replayweb.page.

warc-embed is LIL's experimental client-side playback integration boilerplate, which can be used to test out and explore this new technology, along with its potential new applications. It consists of: a simple web server configuration that provides web archive playback; a preconfigured “embed” page that can be easily implemented to interact with replayweb.page; and a two-way communication layer that allows the replay to reliably and safely communicate with the archive. These features are replicable for a relatively non-technical audience and thus we sought to explore small scale applications of it outside of our group.

This is one of two proposals relating to this work. We believe there is an IIPC audience who could attend either or both sessions based on their interests. They explore separate topics relating to the core technology. This session will look into user applications of the tool and institutional user feedback from the Harvard Library community.

Our colleagues at Harvard use the Internet Archive’s Archive-It across the board for the majority of their web archiving collections and access. As an experiment, we have worked with some of them to host and serve their .warcs via warc-embed. We scoped work based on their needs and made adjustments based on their ability to apply the technology. One example of this is a refresh of the software to be able to mesh with WordPress, which was more easily managed directly by the team. This session will explore a breakdown of roadblocks, design strategies, and wins from this collaboration. It will focus on the end-user results and applications of the technology.