Archiving the Covid-19 pandemic

There are various methods of collecting social media, some more technical than others.

Less technical:

By screenshot, i.e. by simply taking a digital image of what you can see on screen when you look at a particular social media portal. You can do this by using a snipping tool like 'snip and sketch', or by using Print Screen and pasting the image into a word processing or paint file.

Advantages:

• Quick and easy to do
• Can save in the same way as your digitised images
• Allows you to be selective in what you collect

Disadvantages:

• Not useful for preserving the 'functionality' of websites, eg linking to other pages, watching video etc.
• May not automatically attach useful meta data like web address and time and date of the content creation. (Will attach the time and date of the image creation, but it is not the same thing)

To redact any personal information, you can draw black boxes over the particular information you want to hide. Then save it as a jpeg (for your access copy), or as a Tiff file (for your master or preservation copy). You can find out more about suitable file types for archiving on our digitisation training video.

More technical: using web capturing software

There are now software products on the market for collating and archiving social media content. For example, 'Conifer', which is the software we are currently recommending for community archive groups.

Advantages:

• Open source, meaning anyone can use it and there's no fee
• Preserves to archive preservation quality
• Can capture huge amounts of information
• Lots of community support, through user discussion forums etc.

Disadvantages:

• Can be time-consuming
• Requires some degree of training
• May have to do some weeding of the generated archive to meet your collecting policy

Conifer is free to start with, although you may have to pay for larger storage. It has lots of online guides and support available on how to use it. It is also pretty easy to use, you just enter the address of the web page you want to archive and press record. Conifer can also:

• Archive links to other pages
• Play video and audio
• Allow you to download documents

You will need to click on all of these whilst it is recording, so if you have a large website to archive it can be very time-consuming. It may be best to use this to capture smaller sites at regular intervals, so researchers can get an idea of how the site changed over time.

Conifer Web Archiving Software Links

Visit the Conifer website

Home: Quick Start | Conifer User Guide (rhizome.org)

GMALPS - Web Archiving Tutorial - Lesson 2 Part 2 - Conifer - YouTube