Our mighty ambassador Beatrice Cannelli has successfully completed her PhD thesis on Archiving Social Media, very interesting and topical for archives today!
Her thesis investigates challenges and solutions related to the development of social media collections. In the last decade, the cultural value of social media and the discussions generated on these platforms have been widely recognised, with archiving institutions increasingly looking into preserving this important resource. However, while archiving institutions have made significant progress in establishing practices related to the preservation of websites, social media data still presents significant challenges. Despite being an integral part of the World Wide Web, social media platforms have become a sort of separate ecosystem with unique characteristics, dynamics and technical aspects that increasingly separate them from traditional websites. While scholarship has explored web archiving practices at length, little research has been specifically dedicated to investigating challenges and approaches concerning the development of social media collections.
Drawing from fieldwork and interviews with twelve web archivists from memory institutions archiving or planning to archive social media, this thesis provides a cross-national comparative analysis of the practices and solutions adopted for the collection of social media. The study is further enriched by two case studies focusing on archiving initiatives operating under electronic legal deposit legislation in the United Kingdom and France. It contributes to the advancement of social media archiving practices by offering guidelines and recommendations to support the practical development of future initiatives, extending beyond national libraries and archives.
Her work, titled "Archiving Social Media: A comparative study of the practices, obstacles, and opportunities related to the development of social media archives", is freely available on the School of Advanced Studies repository. You can read it at this link: https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/10023/