In our Creating Digital History class, we recently read David Weinberger’s great book “Everything is Miscellaneous” — he’s got a PhD in Philosophy, and went on from there (somehow) to become a bona fide Internet Guru. He’s definitely contributing to the “dialogue about organizing knowledge” — in a techno-populist and techno-utopian way that I must admit I’m a sucker for. The argument of books like that would argue that Wikipedia’s very lack of fixity (so often derided by librarians etcetera) is exactly what makes it more authoritative in this poststructuralist age, when we’ve supposedly learned that knowledge isn’t fixed.

To answer Julianna’s point, I’ll say that she’s right about the need to archive Twitter and the potential interest in Twitter down the road. From a broader, government-wide perspective, the same thinking applies as well. For instance, most public statements (press releases, annual reports) from Federal agencies are generally appraised as permanent records. It’s then an easy leap to translate that to the Twitter feed created by an agency – such as NASA or the CDC. It’s a little awkward when the agencies don’t own the servers that they are posting to, but as everyone has mentioned, tools exist that allow the capture of tweets. Personally, I’ve used Tweetake to get a CSV backup and it worked pretty well.

Twitter is actually pretty straightforward on both the appraisal and the technology side. Where it gets more difficult is where the content is not as easy to appraise, let alone capture – think Facebook. That’s where archivists can argue about appraisal theory and still not agree. Some agencies use FB as a place to aggregate their press releases and such. You can make the argument that if that’s the case, then as long as the original press releases are captured in other places, then the content on FB is not a record. But what do you do with comments that exist solely on FB at that point?

I’m glad that students like Julianna are thinking about archival preservation on web 2.0 platforms. That bodes well for the profession moving forward. I also feel that traditional archival appraisal theory has to evolve as well. We’re seeing the first steps of that evolution. Keep up the good work. Now, I’ll go back to worrying about how to capture content from Second Life.

The other option is the Twapperkeeper, but I have less experience with that and do not believe it’s as easily exported. Many folks dealing with digital preservation and web archiving are researching ways to archive web 2.0 content. It’s a very new field and for obvious reasons, will be very important down the road.

I do know that right now if you want to archive a Twitter feed, you have to set it up beforehand — one way it can be done is by subscribing to the feed with an RSS reader such as Google Reader and then outputting the feed as plain text.