I suppose the only thing you miss archiving then is the conversations around the Walker Images/Video/Tweets. I guess those are of questionable long term value, plus they happen on someone else’s space so are not up for archiving.

I find it surprisingly fun and informative to keep up with the twitter feed as opposed to just following the Walker RSSs. Nice work.

We definitely keep much of what goes into YouTube archived. We’ve slowly been uploading videos from the Walker Channel to YT, and all of that is archived, both on hard drive and to tape, included in Walker Archives. Not all of the stuff that goes into YT we keep. For instance, I uploaded a broomball clip, and if YouTube were to loose it for some reason, I wouldn’t shed a tear.

For flickr, we’re pretty much in the same boat. Exhibition install images are part of the archive. Less important stuff is not quite as rigorously backed up. The After Hours photos just sit on my hard drive, and photos that other staff upload are likely in the same boat.

So, the media itself is fairly well covered, where appropriate, and we could restore things if need be. But really, that’s only part of the equation and doesn’t cover the time taken to sort, edit, update, etc, which would be considerable. There’s also the issue of what happens when the institution moves more into these other services, what is our role to document on the same level as everything else… I don’t really know.

To a large extent, we’re betting that Google, Flickr, and Facebook are too big to go away soon, and if they were, there’d probably be some kind of migration path.

Are you guys doing anything to keep a local or cached copy of the stuff in social media sites?

For instance does that stuff ever get pulled back into an archive owned by the Walker? Or do you ever keep a cached copy incase Flickr has a hiccup or YouTube accidentally takes down a video?

Been working through some of that stuff myself and would love to here your thoughts on the matter.