Activist Social Media Archiving: Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities

Social media has played a significant role in recent activist movements. It empowers activists to organize and communicate their experiences. Archival efforts to document narratives that are historically silenced makes activist material an attractive collecting area. However, archives trying to preserve digital ephemera like social media from activist movements face digital preservation challenges as well as ethical considerations. By conducting online surveys and semi-structured interviews with archivists working on projects collecting activist social media this study found that activist social collecting projects: 1) face ethical and collection development challenges, 2) usually follow traditional models for acquisition, description, and access, and 3) increase donor and user engagement with collections. This suggests that in the future the profession would benefit from the development of best practices surrounding ethical collection development and use of activist social media.Master of Science in Library Scienc