Safer more inclusive web collecting WILD Imaginings The Summer Reading Alpacalypse

Have you ever stopped to think about all the digital content stored and available online? What about your own and your whanau’s online content? Those photos and posts you’ve uploaded to social media; the online groups you’re part of? Have you ever wondered if any of that content might be of value to future generations of New Zealanders?

At the National Library of New Zealand we’re very aware how ephemeral web content is. Numerous platforms have come and gone and the digital content within may have disappeared completely. But we’re also aware we can only collect a fraction of all that is out there. Much content is private to an individual, family, or community group so if we collect this material we want to ensure that it is preserved, but with the appropriate levels of access in place, balancing the need for keeping personal data safe, but also respecting freedom of access to information for public content.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE COLLIDE

Our digital collecting programme has allowed us to collect websites and other online material from a diverse range of community groups. However, until recently we haven’t included much social media in our efforts. Social media plays an important role in people’s lives and many groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in our collections use social media as one of their main means of communication. One of the reasons social media is challenging to collect is that it can contain both public and private information.

Most of our collecting of online content is done under the legal deposit provisions of the National Library Act. Legal deposit has a long history in the print publishing world, with publishers having a legal requirement to provide copies to their national library. As publishing moved online, national libraries have updated their legislation to enable them to collect this new content. In New Zealand, as in many other countries, this was partly done by carving out an exception to copyright law that allows us to copy and preserve material published by New Zealanders online (including websites) without requiring permission from the copyright holder.

This all seemed fairly straightforward when most online publishing consisted of freely accessible websites under the control of the content creators. But the online world now is increasingly an interwoven collection of international content platforms run by global behemoths like Facebook, Google and Twitter. When it comes to social media, how should we determine what’s in scope for Legal Deposit and what should be considered archival, unpublished material? Increasingly we have to consider not simply what is legal under our legalisation, but what is ethical as well. What’s public and what’s private in the online world? What about people and groups from marginalised communities who want to be able to safely share their stories on their own terms?

There has been much discussion about ethical collecting in the archival world which we have followed with interest. We’ve been particularly impressed with Documenting the Now Project who have created tools to enable the ethical collecting of Twitter harvests relating to ‘Black Lives Matter.’ We have used some of those tools to collect tweets of significant events like the 2016 Kaikoura Earthquake and the 2019 Christchurch Mosque attacks. Access to our full dataset is restricted, but we can make the Tweet IDS publicly available as pointers to the live versions of the tweets in the dataset. This means we are not inadvertently republishing tweets that authors have chosen to delete from the live web.

EMPOWERING THE COMMUNITY

We know that many libraries and archives who collect local histories of their area may not have considered social media or websites in their own collecting plans, or have put it in the ‘too hard’ basket. Our LIANZA 2019 conference presentation ‘Collecting the Conversations That Matter’ includes some tools and practical considerations to help you start building collections of online content. The National Library is happy to help provide further advice and support – contact us at ATL@ dia.govt.nz.

We need to continue to diversify our collections and for us that includes working with community groups to raise awareness of the need to preserve

their online content. If people or organisations download and back up their social media or web content then libraries and archives will be more able to collect them at some point through donations. We can also do more to support a ‘post custodial’ model of archives, where we provide support for communities to maintain their own digital archives rather than necessarily accessioning the material to our big institutions.

The Library has started to reach out to community groups to collect social media archives that have national significance. One example is the ‘We are Beneficiaries Project archives’ which has provided a space for beneficiaries to voice their concerns about their treatment by uploading their stories and art work to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. This is a collection of digital art work and social media accounts of systemic issues including underfunding and bias against Māori, single mothers, and people with disabilities. Another example is the Outloud Aotearoa Project archives that Rainbow Youth gave to the library, documenting experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, transgender and intersex individuals. In both cases, the account holders discussed with their members what should be donated to the National Library and what levels of access conditions would be appropriate for the Library to provide.

ASK THE INTERNET

At Nethui 2019 we facilitated a session called ‘Stop, collaborate and listen’ about how we can work together to provide safer and more inclusive web collecting. Taking this discussion to Nethui helped us to step outside our GLAM world and get the perspective of New Zealand’s wider Internet community. Questions raised by participants included how people could request removal of content in our collections if they felt it breached copyright, privacy or other considerations. When we asked how people felt about the Library collecting tweets about significant events, most people felt that Twitter was a public platform and that they had no problem with content being collected. The main concern was how that content could be accessed and used.

We’ve had that same conversation in the National Library and have decided that we need a robust take-down policy. We have also decided to treat social media accounts that have been provided to us by the account owner as archival material as they often contain private information that was not made publicly available.

These are just some of the ways we’ve been looking to enable safer more inclusive web collecting. Hopefully as we build these collections New Zealanders from diverse backgrounds and walks of life will see the stories that matter to them reflected in the National Library’s collections, and in the collections of other organisations and community groups.

Gillian Lee; is the Coordinator, Web Archives for the Alexander Turnbull Library at Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa. She leads a small team of web archivists who select and archive New Zealand websites for the Library’s collections.

Amy Joseph; is the Kaiārahi Rōpū Whakaputu a-ture (Team Leader Legal Deposit) at Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa. She loves the challenges of collecting the weird and wonderful things New Zealanders are publishing online, and puzzling through the ethical issues that emerge as we all document so much of our lives in public but commercially-controlled spaces.