Archival Value of Social Media

If James Joyce had had a Twitter account, would literary scholars today be interested in them?  Probably.  But would they be valuable to scholarship, or just a source personal amusement?

These are questions facing archivists today. The best strategies for managing digital archival material in general are still being debated, and a person or organization’s social media posts are just one (particularly complicated) piece of that digital puzzle. The technical means of gathering social media records is a problem in itself.  To begin with, many of these records are not even the property of the person who created them.  What you put on Twitter is actually the property of Twitter, which is why, for example, the company was able to turn over all tweets to the Library of Congress to be part of its collections.  This Twitter archives has turned out to have some problems, not surprisingly, because of its massive size (170 billion tweets as of 2013).  A single search of the entire collection can take up to 24 hours to execute.*

Going back to the question of ownership, a person can actually download the “archives” of their accounts from some social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. These downloads, however, completely strip away the activity of others (among other things), which means a loss of essential contextual information and, basically, the “social” and “network” aspects.  Moreover, someone would have to think to download their social media archive while still living, and before they donated material to an archives or library.  Quite frequently, it is only after a person has passed away that the donation happens. Access to an individuals social media accounts becomes rather tricky at this point.

But the question around these issues that I find most compelling is simply whether or not social media even should be considered part of person’s archives and, if so, in what way and to what extent.  This really gets at the issue of social media and identity.  In what ways do we reveal our identity through social media? Are these true identities?  If they are, in fact, actually performed identities to some degree (some people are more performative than others in their social media posts), would they still be valuable in the archival fond of a person?

My opinion is that there is really no way to know right now. My reason: there are really no tried and true methods for assessing the archival value of any personal records, whether they are on paper, on a hard drive, or in the cloud.  Archival theory is essentially based on institutional records, and the traditional ways of identifying archival value in institutional records (and therefore deciding what will be kept in the archives) do not translate all that well when dealing with personal archives (i.e., the records of an individual, family, or possible a small community).  I won’t go into much detail about this here,** except to say that if we are still trying to figure out how to appraise personal archives generally, and also still trying to figure out how to manage digital archives generally, questions around the value of and strategies for managing all of these cloud-based social media records are a long way from being answered.


* You can read more about the Library of Congress’ Twitter archive and the challenges that they are facing in managing it in LOC’s report “Update on the Twitter Archive At the Library of Congress,” available here.

** For some more in-depth reading about the appraising and managing personal archives, I suggest the following readings:

The Character of Personal Archives: Reflections on the Value of Records of Individuals, by Catherine Hobbs (Archivaria, Fall 2001)

The Appraisal of Personal Papers: A Critical Literature Review, by Riva A. Pollard (Archivaria, Fall 2001)

In Search of a Theory of Private Archives: The Foundational Writings of Jenkinson and Schellenberg Revisited, by Rob Fisher (Archivaria, Spring 2009)

1 thought on “Archival Value of Social Media

  1. I find it really great to have a discussion of social media from the perspective of archives. I agree that it will be very interesting to see how these collections of social media will be used and how valuable they will become. Because right now it appears to be more a result of our ability to collect massive amounts of data, rather than a belief that it has true value.

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