North Carolina State U. Library Awarded Grant to Develop Social Media Collection, Curation, and Preservation Toolkit

The North Carolina State University Libraries has been awarded a grant to tackle a significant emerging opportunity for academic libraries and the historians, social scientists, and other researchers that they support: how best to capture and save the increasingly critical but ephemeral social media conversations that now regularly document our lives and times.

The EZ Innovation Grant from the State Library of North Carolina will enable librarians Jason Casden and Brian Dietz to lead a team to develop a freely available web toolkit to help guide institutions that preserve our cultural heritage by collecting and curating the primary documents that are the raw materials of history. Increasingly these materials are created and shared on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms. But since few institutions are systematically saving these conversations, much of our current history’s raw material is quickly and irrevocably disappearing as quickly as it is produced. And while tools to save these materials are becoming more sophisticated and less expensive, very little has been done to help libraries and others deploy them in thoughtful, effective ways.
The NCSU Libraries has previously taken a lead role in this area with its award- winning Lentil platform, an open-source tool that harvests and makes it easy to present collections of social media images from the Instagram platform. The new grant would build on this work by exploring methods and best practices for integrating social media into existing ways that libraries collect primary materials.
The team will start by investigating social media associated with campus events, spaces, student groups, and campus units at NC State—and will develop software, procedures, and documentation to cost-effectively implement social media archiving at the NCSU Libraries.
This work will then allow the team to develop a web toolkit to help other institutions:
● Collect official communication of various organizational groups
● Collect unofficial, crowdsourced communication from communities of interest