An Overview of Social Media Archiving Tools

This report is the outcome of a project funded by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network/Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed (DDHN/NDE) between 2019 and 2020, which called for cultural heritage institutions in the Netherlands to conduct research in order to build knowledge and capacity in social media archiving. The projects that were selected ranged from looking into criteria for appraising and selecting social media collections, to legal issues in social media archiving and the problematics of offering access to such collections.

As part of developing our born-digital archiving expertise, the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam proposed to NDE and undertook a project on social media archiving tools. The project looked specifically at tools for the capturing of social media content, and its aim was to assist professionals working mainly but not exclusively at cultural heritage organizations to select appropriate tools for social media archiving. The result is an overview of a range of tools for social media capturing falling into two broad categories: those preserving the “look and feel” of social media, and those preserving structured social media data. The tool survey is accompanied by a contextualization of social media archiving tool selection as an archival issue, and by the description of use cases that display tool usage in different contexts.