Archiving Social Media Data: A guide for archivists and researchers

Social media data are increasingly used in the social sciences. Archiving social media data is associated with a number of specific practical, legal, and ethical challenges that researchers and archivists need to address. In addition, the documentation of social media data also has its own requirements. This guide discusses these different challenges and provides suggestions for addressing them. Based on general considerations as well as examples of social media data that have been archived by CESSDA service providers (and how the identified challenges have been dealt with in those cases), the guide presents suggestions for metadata elements that need to be developed or extended for the proper documentation of social media data. Taking into account the various challenges in archiving social media data and how they may be addressed, the guide also presents practical recommendations for researchers working with social media data and the development of social media data collection tools with regard to the requirements for archiving them.