Facebook | Katie's Little Blog

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)

I have one social media account: Facebook. I reluctantly made this account five years ago after moving across the country, as a way to stay in touch with folks back home. Since then, I have posted a grand total of three status updates and 16 photographs. I login once a week or so, sometimes more if I’m looking for a source of procrastination. Because of this, I often find myself afflicted with what I call “Facebook guilt” : I didn’t like enough photographs. I missed my former classmate’s birthday. I failed to comment on a friend’s update about a new job within three hours of them posting.

The guilt usually passes pretty quickly though. I find out about the things that matter most in other ways. I’m by no means against social media; it just isn’t my thing. I do think it can be overused, but I also think it can have value. And I’ve finally admitted to myself that it is not going away and that, if for nothing else than professional reasons, I should probably become more versed in how to use it, which is why I am taking this class.

I do have a small amount of experience managing the Facebook account of an organization, the nonprofit where I worked for many years prior to coming to SLAIS. Like many other organizations, we realized that we needed to jump on the social media bandwagon and so started a Facebook page, without much of a strategy in place beyond post regularly and get as many followers as possible. And this is what I did. Even at the time, I knew we could be using social media more to our advantage, but did know how. Like many other organizations, especially smaller nonprofits, we simply did not have the staff time to devote to developing a social media strategy that fully integrated with our overall communications.

As for the world of social media beyond Facebook, I have never been anything more than an occasional spectator. I read a few blogs related to archives, libraries, and other areas of personal interest to me. I’ve never taken the time to use any sort of feed aggregation tool, mostly because I feel like if I did do that, I would end up with too may feeds and just end up scrolling through entirely too many titles.