Why the White House is Hiring a Social Media Archivist

What a great post!  In her post Why the White House is Hiring a Social Media Archivist, Christina Warren writes about the White House search for a social media archivist, explaining that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978 made the records of the President public and mandated that they by filed with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).  Now collecting those records has never been easy, but over the years procedures have been worked out.

Now, however, it is a whole new ball game.  This administration has begun to make use of online social networking tools.  Though their efforts have been a bit clumsy, they have been successful enough to pose new problems.

as White House (and by extension, the Executive Office of the President) communication extends into areas of social media, that presents new challenges in archiving things like blog postings, Twitter messages, YouTube videos and so-on. This content, plus the comments and replies associated with them (think letters to the President) all need to be archived under the PRA.

And so the White House is seeking bids from an outside contractor to do that for them.  But what I really liked was the way the post brought the issue back down to our level.

As social media becomes a more integral part of how the government communicates, saving that data and making sure it is accessible and recorded in the proper context for the future becomes more and more important.

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Do you preserve your own lifestreaming data? What about your company? What do you think needs to be done to make archiving social media streams more accessible?

It’s such a good question.  I don’t plan on hiring a social media archivist anytime soon, but it does give me pause.  I still have boxes of letters from when I was in Morocco and reading them brings back a lot of memories.  How will I ever do that with cyber correspondence which, ultimately, is save on servers no even on my control.  Hmmm?

What do you think?  Respond here or continue the discussion at Christina’s post.