Does anyone have advice on the best way to capture social media records. For eg. there are Twitter and facebook capture tools out there, but the process is quite labour intensive. If you were advising an enterprise approach, would it be to invest in such tools? I have been trying to find some solid advice that will properly allow the capture of social media content that are business records. There doesn't seem to be any???
Replies
Susan,
you mention you found info on JISC particularly regarding how to capture using different technologies. Could you guide me to the particular article(s)? - I don't seem to have hit on what you found.
ta
David
Hi David
I think I was looking at the archiving websites projects (Web Archiving a Feasability Study for JISC and the Wellcome Trust) which mentioned browser plugins, snapshotting, sampling, automatic harvesting, and site replication /mirroring. Nothing I'm sure you ha
ven't heard of before. Sorry I can't seem to cut and paste a link to it here.
Thanks Agnes, I found the National Archives link particularly useful
Well, maybe this is worthwhile:
NARA Bulletin 2011-02 "Guidance on Managing Records in Web 2.0/Social Media Platforms"
or
JISC.
Thanks Agnes. The JISC is particularly clear about 'how to' capture through particular technologies. This solution becomes a competing funding issue within organisations. I suppose that is no different to the ongoing issue of trying to manage an organisation's business crtical or permanent email. We are back to the same issues of using risk strategies to choose which information our resources manage and the need to fulfil compliance requirements.
I've come to the conclusion that my role is to raise awareness of the issues around managing records of social technologies, and where possible, contribute to information strategies that will prioritise the business information that is to be managed permanantly.
The issues you raise reminds me of the often mentioned shortcomings of printing off emails as a RK solution.
Indeed Susan,
only yesterday I recieved an inquiry from one of our government agencies as how to sentence records of Facebook threads that they were capturing by saving as Word docs. I'm confident about answering the disposal question, but not sure necessarily about the efficiency of their capture method.
David
Tas Archive and Heritage Office
Yes NAA's advice is to "to ensure that an accurate and authentic ‘original’ copy of information is captured and saved as a record.". They then use a case study to show how an agency captures a plain text version of a twitter stream. This method is not capturing an accurate and authentic copy of the original record.
If I capture my Twitter Home page as a text file it looks nothing like the twitter page or the original tweets and its really hard to read!. It does document the links so you could reproduce the links, but it doesn't say its my home page, it doesnt give the day I captured it. I am writing some training material at the moment and I don't want to give NAA's advice as a solution to capturing SM records.
Twitter - Susan Kennedy's Home Page.txt