A Call to Action on Social Media Archiving (and More)

Briefly back in Australia, yesterday I went down to Sydney to speak at the Australian Society of Archivists’ 2011 Symposium (staged at the fabulous Luna Park venue). My paper was meant as an urgent call to action on the question of archiving public activities in social media spaces – so much material which will be of immense value to future researchers is being lost every day if we don’t get our act together very soon; we can’t wait for the lumbering beast that is the U.S. Library of Congress to do the job for us, however fulsomely they’ve promised to archive the full public Twitter firehose. The truth is, here in Australia we already have the technologies for capturing and archiving large datasets of public communication on Twitter and elsewhere – but someone with the necessary public standing and archivist expertise (the National Library, the National Archives, …) must now take the initiative; the sooner, the better.

My paper (with audio) is below:

Having safely returned from Sydney, on Sunday I’m off again; this time to Berlin for the inaugural symposium of the new Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, sponsored by Google and supported inter alia by my dear friends from the Hans-Bredow-Institut, Hamburg. The symposium, which should be a very exciting event, will help determine the future research agenda of the new Institute.

After that, I go on to Rio de Janeiro to deliver a keynote on “Gatekeeping, Gatewatching, and Real-Time Feedback” at the annual conference of the Brazilian Society of Journalism Researchers (full paper and slides already online here); and I return to Australia just in time – I hope – to participate in the CCI’s own symposium, held mid-November in Sydney. And that should be my travel done for a while, hopefully…