Guidelines for Preserving New Forms of Scholarship

Some publications, especially in a web environment, may include social media posts or user contributed content that are automatically included in the archive package, especially with a web harvesting approach. Before implementing these features or including them in publications, consider whether taking copies of them infringes on individual rights or safety. Preservation services may not be able to evaluate specific situations in a scalable way, and so it’s important to avoid including these in the preservation scope if there is uncertainty around them. This may involve designing a website in a way that certain content can easily be excluded e.g. keeping this content at a separate URL that can be skipped during crawling. The Documenting the Now project website includes information about ethical collection of social media content.

These guidelines discuss legal and technical considerations for preservation:
8. Ensure terms of service cover preservation of data in third-party services
54. Avoid embedding social media posts in a publication

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