A welcome complement to the lately growing number of web archiving-specific events, the inaugural Web Archives: Capture, Curate, Analyze conference (tweet stream) brought together an eclectic crowd of researchers, instructors, students, archivists, librarians, developers, and others interested in web archiving. A novel mixture of institutions was also represented - some active principally through IIPC, many more associated with the SAA Web Archiving Roundtable and/or Archive-It Partner communities, and still others who I’d not yet encountered in these more established, practitioner-centric fora.

Echoing the sentiments of other participants, I was impressed and inspired both by the diversity of perspectives and the excitement for moving web archiving forward. As befitting such a group, the schedule and hallway conversations crossed a wide array of topics. Running through it all, though, questions of ethics seemed to be a persistent subject. I’ll highlight three areas of ethical concern that stood out for me.

Social media archiving

Seemantani Sharma encapsulated her legal analysis of Twitter archiving noting that what is permissible under the Terms of Service is far clearer than what is responsible as a matter of ethics. While GW Libraries is farther along than most in making sense of how a platform’s terms of service should inform an institutional social media archiving policy, it’s clear that the ethical questions are being grappled with more widely.

The most pronounced critique was the problematization of a binaristic conception of privacy, where public-ness is taken as a tacit approval to archive and thereafter unilaterally determine the disposition of content. Other ethical questions relating to social media archiving concerned consent, post-custodialism, and research use. How can individuals and communities using social media consent to archiving, or at least be meaningfully informed of it? How can the prerogatives of individuals and communities whose social media is archived be aligned and/or balanced with those of the archive and, by proxy, the stakeholders in its contents? How does the theory and practice of post-custodial archiving inform approaches to social media archiving? What are guidelines for ethical use of social media archives?

Appraisal and provenance

In the opening keynote, Jefferson Bailey was eager to highlight how many of the supposedly exceptional conundra of web archives were in fact common to archives generally. Several of such observations were that (web) archives were necessarily incomplete, and always inflected by their curators. As easy as it is to be consumed by the purely operational aspects of web archiving, we often neglect to document the appraisal decisions we make about what to collect and the rationale for capture parameters that may likewise have a powerful, if more incidental effect on the contours of the archive. Our collective choices have consequences for what and whose web heritage will persist, and with what qualifications.

Digital divides in web archiving

All of which is to highlight the need for community efforts to both expand the base and enhance the capacity of web archiving organizations, through a combination of interoperating local tools and/or third-party systems. We envision our IMLS National Digital Platform grant (PDF) with Internet Archive, University of North Texas Libraries, and Rutgers University as one such effort - more to come on this soon, as we ramp up in the New Year.