Social media collection at LAC

Social media content is of increasing interest to researchers, but can be challenging to archive.

How we preserve it

The Web and Social Media Preservation Program uses two methods to preserve social media.

Collection of social media via API

We prefer to collect thematic social media data via Twitter and its API as our primary activity. This means analyzing, selecting and collecting hashtags related to a thematic research collection (for example, collecting hashtags related to the Olympics while we are curating a collection on an in-progress Olympic and Paralympic Games).

Web archiving

Social media accounts can be crawled like any other website. However due to the complexity of social media platforms, this often yields incomplete results. At all times, the Web and Social Media Preservation Program will prefer to acquire from the most stable and preservation-friendly platforms, and will avoid collecting duplicate content published on a less stable platform.