BESOCIAL: A Sustainable Knowledge Graph-Based Workflow for Social Media Archiving

Abstract

Social media as infrastructure for public discourse provide valuable information that needs to be preserved. Several tools for social media harvesting exist, but still only fragmented workflows may be formed with different combinations of such tools. On top of that, social media data but also preservation-related metadata standards are heterogeneous, resulting in a costly manual process. In the framework of BESOCIAL at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), we develop a sustainable social media archiving workflow that integrates heterogeneous data sources in a Europeana and PREMIS-based data model to describe data preserved by open source tools. This allows data stewardship on a uniform representation and we generate metadata records automatically via queries. In this paper, we present a comparison of social media harvesting tools and our Knowledge Graph-based solution which reuses off-the-shelf open source tools to harvest social media and automatically generate preservation-related metadata records. We validate our solution by generating Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and bibliographic MARC records for preservation of harvested social media collections from Twitter collected at KBR. Other archiving institutions can build upon our solution and customize it to their own social media archiving policies.