Paul Scifleet
Charles Sturt University, School of Information Studies, Chalres Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW 2678, Australia
Maureen Henninger
Information & Knowledge Management Program, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Kathryn H. Albright
Charles Sturt University, School of Information Studies, Chalres Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW 2678, Australia

The view we bring to this study is one of documentary practice as the set of techniques, including processes for the selection, synthesis and interpretation of the material form of documents and their content, meaning and context, that librarianship brings to the organization and management of knowledge (Briet, 2006; Pédauque, 2003). Current emphases in social media research on ‘big data’ and quantitative analysis are distracting from the significant role social media have to play as a record of social significance that should be brought into public custody for future use.

In its multiple manifestations, social media are “a new kind of cultural artefact” (Lyman and Kahle, 1998, para 15), as was the World Wide Web when Brewster Kahle set up the Internet Archive, reasoning that “in future it may provide the raw material for a carefully indexed, searchable library” (Kahle, 1997, p. 82).
My note: what the German start promoting in the 60s as Alltagsgeschichte.

https://gnip.com/sources/

the possibility of selective acquisition and management of social media, as a document of specific events and topics, as an alternative to the Library of Congress’s whole-of-archive approach with Twitter.