Category Archives: Uncategorized

Themes

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Things I am thinking about in the context of our football images (as it relates to alternate resources):

  • If the images are placed on Flickr, or if our client decides to make a Facebook group or twitter account for the images, they would be able to back up those accounts using some of the services I have blogged about earlier.
  • The Archive-It website could be useful to our client. They would be the organization and then have multiple collections backed up, with the football image collection being one of them. The football image website is what would be archived.
  • How would these images be used? I’m guessing mainly Alabama football fans will be the ones looking at these images. And if there is a Facebook group or blog on these images, fans will want to look at that as well.

Other things I am thinking about in regards to alternate resources:

  • I still haven’t found anything on how to archive TV content or oral histories. The services I blogged about all have to do with social media.
  • Gretchen (in one of the comments) brought up a good point on legal rights and moral rights when dealing with privacy and social media. Those pesky terms and polices!
  • And who is supposed to be archiving social media anyways? Institutions or individuals?
  • I can see the research potential of social media, in that for historians it would be like looking at journals or day books, to see the day to day life of ordinary citizens. But twitter and Facebook are a new technology, and most of the users are still alive. So again, privacy issues.

What does everyone else think?

And of course…

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Since I am on the topic of archiving social media, I feel I have to mention the Library of Congress archiving twitter. So here is the link to the LOC blog when they announced their decision.

http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/

Backupify

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Backupify is a service that allows users to back-up their social media sites so that they can find that information again later. Backupify is able to backup Google Apps as well as social media and web apps (Gmail, Google Docs/Calendar/etc, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and more). Businesses are able to use this service as well as individuals.

With one account you get centralized access to all of your information, stored securely, easily searchable, and ready for restoration or transfer at a moment’s notice.

 

This seems to be a digital preservation type service in that users are saving their items so that they can restore them later.

Capturing Social media

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I found this article from Fast Company that gives options on how to back up twitter, Facebook,  Flickr and LinkedIn.

  • With Facebook, there is an option under Account settings called “Download Your Information” which exports all your stuff into a zip file.
  • Twitter has an API that can capture your tweets, but only 3,200 of them.
  • With LinkedIn, you are able to back-up your contacts and your profile and you have to do so manually.
  • With Flickr the author recommends FlickrBackup, a desktop downloader tool because Flickr doesn’t have the option to capture your photos.

The author also mentions Backupify a few times, so I am going to go check that out.

More?

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Along the same lines as ThinkUp, I found HootSuite. It also captures social media for users to manage. HootSuite seems to do more (is better) than Thinkup however in that it has more features.

I also get the feeling I am behind the times in that I haven’t heard of HootSuite  before.

ThinkUp

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I ran across this web app called ThinkUp which allows users to capture their social media activity. It works with twitter, Facebook and Google+. It works with PHP app. You are able to “explore and analyze your social network activity”. It is a database that lets you review, analyze, sort out, publish or save of all your social media actions.

This app sounds useful in that users are able to capture and manage the social media. There isn’t much on archiving items however.

Archive-It

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Since I mentioned Archive-It in my last post, I felt I should give a summary on what it is.

Archive-It is a service of the Internet Archive. It was started in 2006. Organizations that want to preserve their digital collections can use Archive-It. Basically the websites, blogs, tweets or whatever social media that the organization wants preserved is “captured” by Archive-It (and the Way-back Machine). Users are directed to a list of when the website or blog was captured and then they can go and view the website/whatever on that specific date.

The Alabama State Archives is an organization that has collections with Archive-It. They have 26 different collections and each collection has numerous websites/whatever that have been captured. So under the collection “Alabama State Agencies T-Y” there are 14 different agencies that are captured. The Alabama Dept of Veteran Affairs website has been captured 5 times, in different years. See example here.

NASA

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I was searching for social media and archiving again and came across a blog post from a NASA blog about the images, tweets and videos that NASA has put online. They apparently are archiving these items through the Archive-It website, which is a service of the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, none of the links in the blog post would take me to the Archive-It site. Going to the Archive-It site itself and searching for NASA brought me right to their collection page! NASA has collections of archived media, social networking, and technical reports. The links work for the social networking and technical reports pages, but not the media pages. The NASA pages haven’t been archived for very long (since 2009) but at least there are records.

Also, this NASA Images website is a repository of all types of images from NASA.There are even metadata listed for each image. They have an advanced search box as well.

Social media – archiving

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I found this article here from the Wired Campus blog about an archiving social media conference. Turns out the website for the conference was the website Sami wrote about in her blog! The article I read was a summary of some of the topics discussed at the conference:

  • Keeping archives dark – Not everyone wants their twitter feed to be archived, so there was discussion of rights and permissions on seeing social media.
  • The question of what exactly to archive came up. Should archivists try to save everything or only certain things? (what type of certain things?)
  • The issue of different software was discussed. With the multitude of software formats out there, being able to archive all of it and make it coherent is a problem.

At the end of the article there was a link to the category Archive Watch, which is a category on the Wired Campus blog. I’m going to go and read over some of those blog posts to see what I can find.

National Archives-Web 2.0

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I was looking up oral history repositories and social media archives when I found a link to the National Archives that listed all the National Archives’ Web 2.0 endeavors. It just shows which part of the Archives are using what type of social media. And then I saw that the Archivist of the United States had a blog. (and a tumblr and twitter). This might not be news to anyone else but I thought it was cool. And he had a blog post on embracing social media!

Therefore, we all need to be experimenting and keeping an eye on the new and emerging social media platforms because that is where our user communities expect to be meeting us.

Not necessarily indexing alternate resources but cool nonetheless.