Digital curation practices on web and social media archiving in libraries and archives

Abstract

Libraries and archives preserve websites and social media content with significant value as digital heritage with potential value for future digital scholarly research. This research investigates, from the practitioners’ perspective, the approaches and challenges the libraries and archives face in the curation process, from acquisition to preservation and provision of access to archive such digital content. Qualitative research was undertaken to explore the archiving practices through semi-structured interviews with 13 practitioners working in international libraries and archives at national and institutional levels across three continents. All interviews were coded and summarised in correspondence with the research questions. Findings revealed social media have more difficulties in archiving, where participants prefer to acquire less than websites. With the growing volume of data, participants emphasised sufficient planning and preservation actions to sustain future access and improve the discovery of archived digital content. Challenges were found in barriers to social media acquisition, lack of awareness, limited resources for preservation, uneven technical capacity, copyright and privacy concerns, and meeting user demands. Limited research has focused on digital curation concepts in archiving web and social media content, especially in Asia. This research suggested institutions formulate strategic planning and develop good Web and social media archiving practices from the practitioners’ perspective.