In this presentation, we describe the current web archiving program at the University of Kentucky Libraries; provide an overview of the  Wildcat Histories  activist student organization social media preservation project, funded by Project STAND; discuss the technical aspects of the  Wildcat Histories  project; and the project\u27s current status and lessons learned

Bryan, Ruth E

Collier, Emily B

Leigh, Taylor C

English

University of Kentucky

University of Kentucky UKnowledge Library Presentations University of Kentucky Libraries 7-26-2023 UK Libraries' "Wildcat Histories:" Preserving Student Activist Social Media Content Ruth E. Bryan University of Kentucky Libraries, ruth.bryan@uky.edu Taylor C. Leigh University of Kentucky Libraries Emily B. Collier University of Kentucky Libraries Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/libraries_present  Part of the Archival Science Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Repository Citation Bryan, Ruth E.; Leigh, Taylor C.; and Collier, Emily B., "UK Libraries' "Wildcat Histories:" Preserving Student Activist Social Media Content" (2023). Library Presentations. 259. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/libraries_present/259 This Presentation is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Kentucky Libraries at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in Library Presentations by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact UKnowledge@lsv.uky.edu. Hi. My name is Taylor Leigh. I am the Hispanic Studies Librarian at UK and the PI on this grant. In the coming slides, I will talk a bit about Project STAND and our grant project, Wildcat Histories.Project STAND is a consortium of archivists, memory workers, student organizers, and independent scholars dedicated to preserving the voices of historically marginalized student organizers. It was founded in 2018 and has received funding from Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Mellon Foundation. In 2021, they began their micro-grant program to support projects that preserve and digitize records of student activist organizations. Incidentally, applicants can also apply for a 2-year Archive-It subscription, which is especially important for institutions that cannot afford an Archive-It subscription under normal circumstances. We were awarded a micro-grant in 2022 for our Wildcat Histories project whose objective was to digitize and make student activist records available online.The origins of Wildcat Histories date back to 2018 when Daniela Gamez Salgado, former Latino Student Union president and student archives assistant, began researching the history of Hispanic/Latinx students at UK using University Archives records. As the president of the Latino Student Union, she donated the initial materials that created an archival collection, and she created a paper and an exhibit based on her work. Meanwhile, UK Libraries’ web archiving initiative began in 2018 with the hiring of Emily Collier and a subscription to Archive-It. Then in 2020, Daniela started a student organizations outreach project and came up with the title Wildcat Histories. Our grant entails a partnership with the Latino Student Union to preserve their social media content and make it publicly accessible through University Archives. In the interest of financially supporting the groups we were working with, we budgeted to employ several LSU members to assist with various parts of the project and we earmarked around $2000 to distribute to our target student groups for their participation in archival initiatives. While LSU is our primary student group partner, the larger grant objective is to establish a protocol for preserving social media content. Much of the activity and communication of student groups takes place on social media channels, and that activity is forever lost if archivists or student group leaders do not proactively preserve it. My primary role on the grant has been to coordinate outreach and communication between our team and the 15 student organizations. This has entailed a lot of content creation and relationship building, an important aspect of building archival collections. I have been assisted in this endeavor by a couple of LSU members. These students have created a variety of promotional content and done outreach to their fellow students about the grant and its objectives. While it has proven challenging to connect with students and engage them in the project, especially during certain periods of the academic calendar, we have had some success. Perhaps the most effective outreach event we have organized was a web archiving workshop delivered by representatives from Documenting the Now. This 3hr event was held on Zoom and students received a stipend for attending. This event helped us achieve engagement with around 10 of the 15 student groups.Aside from the workshop, Ruth and I organized a physical exhibit in December 2022 called ““Documenting the Presence of Hispanic Students at UK” and a digital version of this exhibit is currently being developed. We have been able to use this exhibit as an example of something that can be created from archival materials that tells the story of a particular group or population. Looking ahead, we plan to deploy a variety of outreach materials at the start of the fall semester to continue building those relationships and encourage ongoing collaborations between UK Libraries and student organizations. I am working on the Wildcat Histories project, but am not officially on the grant.LSU collection guide screen shot showing the links.Archive-It screen shot for the Student Organizations and Activism web collectionAnd for the Latino Student Union seeds description in Archive-ItAnd the Archive-It calendar page showing the dates of some of the crawls.Hello, my name is Emily Collier, and I’m the web archiving technology consultant for the Wild Histories Project.A significant part of Wildcat Histories was researching the technology needed to archive social media content, and the partnership with the Latino Student Union has acted as a flagship for future work with other groups. This has been extremely valuable as student organizations share so much on social media platforms such as online flyers, photos, videos, event pages, and schedules. Additionally, the interactive nature of social media allows the chance to record relationships and voices in a new way, which adds to the rich cultural heritage of these groups. I’ve been working with web archiving tools since 2019, but social media sites have proved particularly challenging to capture. Our main web archiving tool is Archive-It, however,social media has become a real challenge for it. Therefore, we have also adopted Webrecorder into our workflow which has more consistent success archiving Twitter and Instagram.As I mentioned before, Social Media sites are notoriously hard to capture. For one, social media sites are subject to greater enterprise interference as they go through constant development and updates. Changes to permissions, complex scripts, and other obstacles mean our tools frequently stop working. The developers at the Internet Archive and Webrecorder are always working to keep up with these changes, but it’s difficult and takes a significant amount of time which can result in gaps in our collections. By anticipating those gaps and thinking about how our policy and practice can adapt, we can better prepare ourselves for failures. Here, you can see a crawl by Archive-It next to Webrecorder. With Archive-It, the content was either not captured, or isn’t rendering during replay with Archive-It’s Wayback tool. However, Webrecorder was able to capture and replay this content successfully, so we were still able to capture the Latino Student Union’s Twitter for the archives.For better cohesion and access to our web archives, we rely on Archive-It as a public access point and thus require all of our web archives to be available there. So, after we capture a WARC with Webrecorder, we can download it, then upload it to Archive-It, where it will display in Wayback. This is possible as long as the URL captured with Webrecorder matches the URL in Archive-It. Also, there can be no characters such as hashtag symbols in the file name. Important disadvantages to note here are also that the data from uploaded WARCs to my current knowledge are not deduped in any way. This means that over time, the data burden can get pretty steep. Instagram crawls, for example, will have the same photos and videos uploaded alongside the new content each time. And lastly, if you make a mistake, such as uploading the wrong file, you cannot delete it as of right now.We researched a few other tools by meeting with either representatives of the institution that developed the tool, or an institution that has had success using the tool. However, we postponed on adapting any of these tools for our use because they each came with their own obstacles. DocNow has a slew of tools for archiving Tweets, but it's aimed more at data gathering than true preservation. We also are under the impression that the changes to Twitter’s API will cause DocNow tools to stop functioning, so even though we liked certain aspects about the tool, we didn’t adopt it into any workflows. The change to Twitter API access also means other tools will stop working. We also looked into Social Feed Manager, but it only works for limited sites. While we were interested in it for Twitter, the API change will cause it to lose functionality. Another interesting tool we looked at was Perma.cc. Even though it worked well for several tests, it has a limited number of free uses and our social media tests showed an inability to conquer the login pop ups. Despite not choosing any of these tools for our workflow, we believe it is important to keep alert for new tools because these things may evolve.Because tools evolve, it is also important we go back and research again. The Wildcat Histories project showed us redundancy is key There are always new tools becoming available and they are improving all the time, so it’s always good to take a moment to look up new tools and see what has come up since last you looked. Even if what’s new isn’t worth replacing your current tools, those tools you are using may fail with time. It is nice to have a vocabulary of backup tools in your back pocket. Additionally old tools you may have dismissed may grow to be better than your current tools, or at least worth adopting to use alongside them.  We looked at Webrecorder quite a few years ago and weren’t super impressed, but researching it again this past year impressed us with their updates. And with the standardization of the WARC file format, Archive-it makes it easy to integrate crawls captured with other tools. Rather than take hours to investigate and test new tools, we have used the Wildcat Histories project as a chance to reach out to a professional network of archivists and developers to ask them about their experiences. What tools have they created or used that worked well for them? What kind of outputs do their tools create and how are those outputs made compatible with their existing collections? How is the content in those collections made accessible to users? If we speak with developers, we also want to know how their tool is being funded for maintenance, support and development. The sort of elephant in the room about open source tools is that they can be great solutions, but they can also very risky and not cost effective even if they’re “free.” If the main developer retires, will that tool go away? Will someone take over? What if the tool was grant funded and the money runs out? If I’ve invested my time in a tool, I’ve invested money. If the tool fails and I have to do an overhaul, good chance I’ve wasted some money. That being said,  I’d like to put in here that if an open source tool is truly valuable, the benefits may outweigh the risks and it is important to support these tools so they can be further developed and maintained. It really is about finding a balance and what works best for your institutional needs.

UK Libraries\u27  Wildcat Histories:  Preserving Student Activist Social Media Content

https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1262&context=libraries_present

UK Libraries\u27 Wildcat Histories: Preserving Student Activist Social Media Content

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