Belgian Social Media Archiving Initiatives Mapped

Abstract

Research has demonstrated that born-digital collections, in addition to the known physical objects, are increasingly becoming more present in cultural institutions. Still, a clear overview of Belgian social media archiving (SMA) initiatives is currently lacking. In this study, we map the Belgian landscape of social media archiving initiatives. The BESOCIAL research project used surveys and semi-structured interviews to find out how different initiatives in Belgium are archiving these volatile types of data, such as tweets. Our findings demonstrate that the scope and size of the archiving activities depend on 3 major thresholds: i) time to explore the field of SMA, ii) (technical) in-house knowledge and iii) the limited budget. Results are discussed in terms of selection, harvesting, preservation, and access. Based on our conclusions, we advise that practitioners should consider follow-up research to better understand the implications of certain SMA decisions for the future.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.