Appraisal and Description of Social Media CollectionsSocial media has become a primary space archivists are beginning to explore as an avenue to building rich collections of primary source materials. It is a complex space where topics around politics, culture, entertainment, and social issues are frequently discussed. In addition to the large volume of data present in social media, several different types of content formats can be found there as well, including images, photographs, videos, and websites. This makes it difficult for archivists to make sense of the content. While the collection of social media data has received a lot of attention around software development and large-scale collecting issues, less attention has been paid to the meaningful collection of that content (i.e. appraisal) with the goal of building research collections.
This session will focus on two projects aimed at the appraisal and description of social media content in special collections. One revolving around the work of the
Documenting the Now project which aims to build tools for archivists to help them appraise social media content and the other, a proof-of-concept project in the UCR library to represent social media content in finding aids and as digital collections.
Cobweb: Collaborative Digital Collection Development for Web ArchivesThe demands of archiving the web in comprehensive breadth or thematic depth easily exceed the capacity of any single institution. As such, collaborative approaches to web archiving are necessary, and their success relies on curators understanding both what has already been archived, by whom, and how. With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Cobweb, a joint project of the California Digital Library, UCLA, and Harvard University, supports three key functions of collaborative collection development: nominating, claiming, and holdings. Curators establish thematic collecting projects in Cobweb and encourage nominators to suggest relevant websites as candidates for archiving. For any given project, archival programs can claim their intention to capture a subset of nominated sites. Cobweb interacts with external data sources to populate a holdings registry, aggregating metadata about existing collections and crawled sites to support curators in planning future collecting activity and researchers in exploring archived web resources useful to their research.
Presenters will share recent project activities, including a walkthrough of the most current Cobweb prototype.