Guide to Preservation of Web Resources

Scenario: An Institution has set up an Institutional Twitter account for disseminating news on activities and events. The unspoken expectation is that Twitter will be used across the Institution as an individual productivity and social tool. However, one department has become an early adopter of the technology and is using it in teaching and learning, and research contexts. The Head of this department is now suggesting that a formal policy for capture and preservation of Twitter messages be enacted.

Approaches

Capturing Twitter tweets is straightforward as they are easily downloaded from the RSS feeds that the service generates. These could be converted into text documents or web pages, or even imported into a database or blogging software. A number of solutions are available for tweet preservation such as Twapper Keeper (http://twapperkeeper.com/index.php), FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/), the WordPress Lifestream plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lifestream/), What the Hashtag (http://wthashtag.com/Main_Page) and Tweetdoc (http://www.tweetdoc.org/). More significant is the need to define an Institutional decision about the value of these resources. Why keep Twitter tweets?

• Corporate record: Is a Twitter a digital resource that information professionals should be interested in capturing or preserving? At what point does a Twitter turn into a record that requires the attention of the records manager?
• Scholarly record: can it be demonstrated that tweets are part of the scholarly record that is not captured in other forms?
• Legal reasons: Is Twitter being used to deliver learning? Is there a legal requirement to record what has been sent, as part of the assessment record?

Possible outcomes from the decision:

• It is agreed that Twitter posts are transient and do not need to be preserved. Records of corporate activity are something Institutions consider within their archiving policies, and tweets could be considered part of that corporate record. The decision needs to be reviewed as some information / communication media may take over the role of others.
• As a recognised official Institution publication, the posts need to be subject to Quality Assurance and editorial processes, which include keeping a record of the posts.
• An informal log of posts is kept, in order to have a record of topics that have been covered, audit the number of posts, be able to identify any significant impact from these services, etc.