The archiving of social media may become a big issue. How will it be archived? Who, if anyone. will the info be of value to? Will different services require differnt protocols to archive and retrieve? Privacy concerns? These are just a couple of the many issues that need to be discussed. Would a business researcher find a searchable archive of tweets useful if they were compiling a report about what was said about a their company or a competitor over an extended period of time? What about the very long term? If social media lives up to what’s predicted what resources will historians use to review this period of time? Again, things to think about. We wonder if the Internet Archive or its Archive-It service will begin offering social media archiving?

When it comes to Twitter just finding and accessing a tweet from a few weeks ago can be a challenge. We did a search using Twitter’s own search engine and limited our query to results from the month of September. We were unable to find a single result for the words Chicago and video.

As far as Internet Librarian 2009 goes, Gary was in attendance and on Monday wanted to test out a free service named Twapper Keeper. It’s a free service that creates a permanent* archive of public tweets based on a hashtag, in this case, #il2009.

According to the FAQ, the site is updated every five minutes and if you need to make a change you can contact the provider of Twapper Keeper. We’ve asked the provider of Twapper Keeper a few questions, one of them is if we’re seeing every #il2009 tweet or just selected tweets. If/when we get a response, we will post it here.

You can review tweets in various sized groups from 100 at a time to “all of them” on one page.

If you’re looking at all of them on a single page, you can search by using control-find.

Another feature of Twapper Keeper is the ability to export the material. An API is also available.

So, here’s the page containing nearly 5000 Twitter tweets from #il2009.

Prefer to view smaller groups of tweets at one time? It’s easy, make your selection of how many you want to review at one time near the top of the page.

If you didn’t attend the conference, it’s a great way to get a feel for what took place. If you were there, the archive may be useful to learn about sessions you were unable to attend. It’s also a “modern way” of sharing “what went down” with a variety of groups.

* Finally, it’s true, the archive is only as permanent as the service is. That’s the case with so many Web 2.0 tools and services, available one day, not available a week later. If you really want to make the info permanent either download the tweets or take a scrolling screen cap and save them locally, or use a locally based archiving tool in the first place. This RWW article by Sarah Perez provides several resources to archive Twitter content both web-based and locally.

See Also: Webcast: Google’s Vint Cerf Talks to Info Pros at Internet Librarian Conference

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 and is filed under Libraries and Librarianship, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.