This proposal was submitted in February 2023 to The New School as justification for investment in staff and software to support archiving an at-risk digital format.
Summary
Social networks provide important documentary evidence of life in the twenty-first century, especially as communication platforms for some of the most significant moments of activism in the past decade.
Specialized software is required to capture social media, though the archives field has yet to see widespread adoption of programs built to support this type of content, mostly due to high costs.
One approach that may have the potential to lessen the budget burden could be a consortium between academic archives. Together, the institutions would approach a leading software company for archiving social media, and propose a special subscription rate.
The consortium would also share documentation and resources for archiving social media, which would offer a critically needed contribution to cultural heritage preservation. Currently, programs built to archive social media have been mostly targeted to the government sector to support recordkeeping compliance. This consortium would extend the practice of social network archiving to the broader archives community, and position the participating institutions as pioneering practitioners.
Costs
ArchiveSocial
$350-$799/per month
There are three subscription tiers that factor the number of records and accounts archived each month. A separate cost is added for an online access portal through their app, Open Archive. The New School Archives and Special Collections would likely request the Standard plan at $599/per month with the addition of Open Archive.
Background
A common practice by archivists has been to use services developed for web archiving to collect social media accounts, despite its inability to handle the features that define social networks, such as revised algorithms, commenting, and scrolling feeds.
These qualities often lead to broken captures and missing information, like this example of an archived Instagram account in the NYU COVID-19 Web Activism collection:
Delayed implementation of the infrastructure needed to preserve digital materials is not unusual, since it usually requires niche software that may take years to become commonly used and documented by the archives community, and also, new investment in software subscriptions and staff time is essential. As an example, The New School launched their first “cyberspace campus” in the 1990s, and yet, the Archives did not establish an infrastructure for web archiving until 2016.
For most analog materials, like papers and even physical film or audio, collecting years after the creation date does not pose significant risks if it is stored in an office or other moderately maintained environment. This is not the case for digital materials, which are more fragile due to their reliance on continually updated software, hosting services, and file networks. In fact, the loss caused by inaction has been termed the “digital dark age.”
Consortium Precedent
Ivy Plus Libraries Web Collecting Program
The Ivy Plus Libraries Web Collecting Program was established in 2017 between academic libraries as a way to “bolster collaborative collection building and thinking through web archiving.”
New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) Web Archiving Program
NYARC is a partnership between three premier art libraries. Their Web Archiving program has successfully provided a path for resource sharing and development of “curated collections of websites in areas that correspond to the scope and strengths of the print collections at each research library.”
Stakeholders
In addition to The New School, the participating institutions will have an established investment in digital archives infrastructure as evidence of their ability to commit to the preservation of this unique form of born-digital media.