title: Archiving Strategies For Texts And Instant Messages By Politicians In Office. A Belgian Case Study
creators: Bieke Nouws
abstract: In recent years, Europe has witnessed several incidents involving high-ranking political officeholders using text and instant messages for official business, with subsequent challenges in retrieving these messages at a later stage. Prompted by these events, the State Archives of Belgium embarked on a mission to identify measures to safeguard the nation's collective memory – increasingly shaped by alternative archive types like mobile messages – and to ensure accountability of elected officials in both the short and long term. This paper outlines the findings of this endeavor. After a brief introduction and summary on the emergence of text and instant messaging as pivotal communication tools, we first assess their suitability for policy-making dialogue. Then follows an exploration of the preservation challenges the medium presents, both in a general context and specifically within Belgium, and of some strategies that can be employed to mitigate these challenges. In the conclusion, we summarise and put forward additional steps that archives can take to ensure the preservation of text messages by political officeholders, and briefly contemplate on the disclosure of these messages to the public in the short and long run.
keywords: approaches to preservation from document to data