Archiving IU Social Media with Archive-It

Abstract

The Indiana University Archives has been capturing the web content created by IU Bloomington offices for over a decade. We began by running trial crawls in late 2005, and in 2006 fully committed to the project. Archive-It, a service of the Internet Archive, allows us to harvest and build collections of web sites and other digital content. This summer, we expanded our scope to include the social media content of offices across campus. The IU Bloomington social media index identifies nearly 500 accounts across various platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Vimeo. While some accounts are more active than others, valuable content is continuously created and shared. This presentation will provide an overview of the social media collection, highlight some of the technical challenges we faced, and discuss the value the collection brings to the overall holdings of the University Archives.