Archiving social media: the final push
29 Sep 2022Do you keep finding yourself scrolling through your Facebook timeline? Then you’re not alone. Social media has become part and parcel of our daily lives, but this fleeting content is not always adequately archived. In our project on Best practices for archiving social media in Flanders and Brussels, we’re investigating how to best capture and archive these posts. And now we’re ready for the final push.
This KADOC project, in which meemoo is the main partner, was set up to develop workflows and best practices for capturing valuable online information from social media. An overview of the results is available on CEST (link in Dutch), where you will also find severable deliverables now that phase two is complete.
Professional tools put to the test
You might have already seen that we tested some free open source tools for capturing social media when we launched this project. But we came to the conclusion that none of these tools offered a complete solution for archiving Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter accounts.
Over the past few months, we have therefore repeated the pilot projects from phase one to carefully test a range of commercial tools. And it turns out that these paid tools don't offer an ideal solution either. We therefore went in search of tools that were suitable for each individual platform, rather than just a single tool for all platforms. Read this report (link in Dutch) to find out which workflows we think are best.
Legal research
Archiving social media is a complex domain full of legal issues, without any ready-made answers. And finding a definitive solution for each issue is made harder by all the different legal domains interacting with each other in a constant state of flux. We are therefore taking steps to research the legal conditions for capturing and archiving social media in more detail. A comprehensive final report is still a way off, but deliverable 5 (link in Dutch) offers a summary of the current situation for anyone who is ready to make a start anyway.
Now what?
We started the third and final phase, in which we’re investigating possibilities for making the captured content available, this month. More to follow.