Surmounting the Barriers to Social Media Archiving - With a Little Help from my Friends
Zefi Kávvadia
Social media platforms have become integral to contemporary communication, serving as vital records of societal, cultural, and political discourse. However, digital preservation professionals face significant challenges in archiving this content. This "Birds of a Feather" session aims to bring together digital archivists, researchers, and allied professionals to discuss these barriers and explore collaborative strategies for advocating change.

Current legal restrictions, such as platform terms of service that prohibit web scraping and API limitations, hinder the ability to capture and preserve social media content for research and cultural heritage purposes. These restrictions even extend to archiving government information shared through official social media accounts. In this session, we will facilitate discussions on specific barriers including but not limited to the legal, ethical, policy-related, practical, technological and organisational contexts of social media archiving in research and cultural heritage institutions. We will also share experiences navigating these challenges, as well as brainstorm advocacy strategies to tackle these barriers and change the existing framework. 

We aim to engage a diverse group of representative stakeholders and experts, including archivists and digital preservation professionals from academic institutions, government bodies, and (private) cultural heritage organisations, as well as researchers, legal experts, and technologists. Even though the framework for social media archiving is embedded in the local context (due to national laws, institutional preferences etc.), participants from all over the world are welcome to participate to share experiences and solutions and/or bring creativity to the table to brainstorm together in a highly interactive session. 

We hope to foster a sense of community and shared purpose among participants. Ideal outcomes include plans for drafting position papers or best practices, a short report on the current state of the art of social media archiving for archival and research purposes and increased motivation to advocate for change within participants' respective institutions and professional networks.
communications and advocacy for dp scaling up