The White House Is Hiring A Social Media Archivist?
This isn’t exactly a job listing as this task is probably too daunting for one person, but last month the Federal Business Opportunities web site posted a notice showing that the White House is looking for someone or some company to archive its social media content.
Mashable! reports:
Although policies and procedures have been in place for years for preserving and archiving paper and electronic traditional documents and records, as White House (and by extension, EOP) communication extends into areas of social media, that presents new challenges in archiving things like blog postings, Twitter (Twitter) messages, YouTube (YouTube) videos and so-on. This content, plus the comments and replies associated with them (think letters to the President) all need to be archived under the Presidential Records Act.
The government has been doing its best to tackle this without outside help, and perhaps predictably, it’s been going about it in the most stunningly inefficient way possible: by taking screengrabs of the sites in question.
(They’re also using social network APIs, but no further details are given on which sites are being scraped using which combination of methods. The RFP says: “Currently, the Government team is capturing the data and content both programmatically (via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from social networks) and manually (through daily screen shots).”)
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