What’s next for social media archiving at the National Archives of the Netherlands and the National Archives of Luxembourg?

by Susanne van den Eijkel (Advisor Digital Recordkeeping) and Lotte Wijsman (Preservation Researcher),**National Archives of the Netherlands and***Guilhem Costenoble** (Archivist), Michel Cottin (Digital Curator), Maxime Detant (Archivist), and Camille Forget (Digital Curator),*National Archives of Luxembourg.

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This is the final blog post ina series of three* about social media archiving at the National Archives of the Netherlands and Luxembourg and their collaboration on the subject.*

Building connections

At the National Archives of the Netherlands (NANETH), we published our Guidelines on Social Media Archiving in January 2025. Since then, we’ve kept the momentum going. We have presented our guideline to governmental organisations and the archiving community, emphasising its importance in relation to the Dutch Archival Law. Our main focus in these presentations was quality control that we have checked with significant properties, different techniques and tools to use, and how to analyse output in different file formats (blog 2).

In the Netherlands, the need to archive social media is clear, for both heritage and legal purposes as explained in our first blog post. However, there is no shared approach yet on how to do this, though the guideline is a good starting point. We are working on a policy for the Dutch government on the use of social media, what exactly should be archived, and how. This is done in collaboration with multiple experts on digital preservation, recordkeeping, policy making, and legal affairs. Additionally, the authors of the NANETH guideline have visited various Dutch government organisations to share their experiences with social media archiving, helped analyse the output, and gathered the challenges that arose during the process. This way, we are able to keep the guideline up to date and share our insights that can be used for the Dutch policy on social media archiving.

We also share our work, questions, and experiences within the international field. For example, we presented our work at the IIPC Web Archiving Conference (WAC) in Paris (2024) and Oslo (2025) and have had multiple meetings with experts from national archives and heritage institutions inside and outside the Netherlands. We have talked about the most suitable techniques and file formats for social media archives as well as the significant properties we find important. This helped us define the best way forward in social media archiving that has been shared within the Netherlands.

At the National Archives of Luxembourg (ANLux), we have prepared a guide for extracting content published on social media. This guide is distributed to archiving delegates and to communication departments within State services. It outlines the motivations and objectives of this data collection and provides step-by-step instructions. This guide is frequently updated to adapt to platform evolutions.

Figure 1: Archiving social media accounts. A practical guide for social media account users, by ANLux, 2025. Targeted campaigns limited in time enabled the establishment of close ties with various stakeholders. First, with the National Library of Luxembourg (BnL), which brings its expertise in web archiving, and with the State Ministry, which officially launches the campaign and sets the tone in terms of transparency, illustrating democratic vitality. Then, with the Government Press Service, which centralises the official discourse and maintains close relationships with communication officers across ministries. The first campaign even led the Government Press Service to consider social media from a new perspective: ‘Preservation by design’, starting from the moment a social media account is created.

Moreover, we discuss the results of our experiences at international conferences, such as the International Archives Symposium in Arnhem in 2024, or at the 2025 Forum of the Association of French Archivists in Rennes, where valuable professional exchanges took place. For instance, our French colleagues became aware of the importance of archiving social media content in the lead-up to political elections, just as we were inspired by the French ministries’ long-standing experience in email and messaging account collection policies.

Keeping pace with a changing landscape

While we share NANETH’s knowledge through presentations, we are just as eager to learn from others. Social media archiving is constantly evolving. Platforms change, and so do the tools we rely on. To keep up with this changing landscape and keep the cycle of exchange going, we do several things.

First, we attend conferences and meetups, such as WAC and the Practice Network Social Media Archiving, which brings together Belgian and Dutch colleagues for workshops and inspiring talks.

Second, we keep up with new literature on the subject. Blogs such as this series are especially valuable. They show that despite working under different laws and contexts, we often face the same challenges.

Finally, we experiment whenever possible. Testing different tools helps us understand how they handle various platforms. One particular challenge we face when experimenting is our own hardware. Government laptops are rather locked down, so we are prohibited from installing software. Especially when tools have dependencies, it is impossible to experiment with these on our work laptops. Therefore, we often rely on old personal laptops for this kind of testing.

At ANLux, the collection of social media archives is based on a community-driven approach, built on transparency at every stage of the process. By directly involving account owners in the extraction of their data, this method ensures producer engagement and fosters the trust essential to the project’s success.

While harvesting has become more difficult in recent years, publishers still permit data extraction by the owner, a fundamental right guaranteed by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In other words, even if platforms tighten their restrictions on scraping and crawling, they cannot prevent a user from accessing and retrieving their own data, which ensures a certain degree of stability within a changing landscape.

Moreover, we have observed that the implementation of our guidelines aligns with the evolving practices on social media, particularly during the recent wave of users leaving X, to recover data and transfer it to the National Archives, before their accounts were closed.

Furthermore, the extractions carried out in Luxembourg use sustainable formats (CSV, JSON). The possibility of format changes after extraction is a question ANLux needs to address for the future. Is it possible (or desirable) to convert the format of an archived account, such as changes into WARC files, for better use and preservation in the long-term, to prevent risks of obsolescence in an evolving technical environment? Although this approach gives satisfaction in terms of the results obtained during the collection campaigns, we await the exploitation by researchers of these collections.

Figure 2: ANLux partnered collection cycle for social media collection with communities.

Evolving with the times

At NANETH, we believe it is not enough to share our knowledge verbally. It is also necessary to record it (we do work in an archive). That is why we created our guideline. From the beginning, our goal has been to make it a living document, one that evolves alongside platforms, tools, and our own expertise.

To keep it manageable, the guideline avoids going into detail about specific tools. Instead, we focus on broader developments, such as platform changes or shifts in archiving practices. When our knowledge advances, the guideline evolves alongside.

Collaboration is key. Soon, we will establish a maintenance group with representatives from diverse Dutch organisations (city archives, ministries, universities, and regional archives). This group will review proposed updates, suggest changes of their own, and help ensure the guideline remains accurate and relevant. Through this collective effort, the document will be regularly refreshed and stay a reliable resource for all.

At ANLux, we are aware that tools and practices change. That is why we ensure our guide is up to date regarding the uses and needs of State services, as well as our policies. Evolving with the times also means we have to explore what has never been explored before — or in a different way — to collect what has not been collected yet, or partially. Our time is a time that paves the way for new archive collections, thanks to some collateral collections that occurred while we focused on social media archiving.

This goes hand in hand with a new approach to relationship-building, the designated partnered collection, which is critical for the success of current and future collections. To support our collaborations, we provided a dedicated help desk and phone support that fostered trust with communication services, positioning ANLux as a supportive partner rather than a regulator. To ensure the integrity of data, we employed a PowerShell script, which demonstrated technical expertise. This tool, with its “Matrix style” scrolling lines of code made quite an impression on the producers.

Figure 3: Screen capture of a PowerShell script used by ANLux to ensure archives integrity. So the demystification of digital archiving turned out to be a collateral effect of this collection campaign. For many producers, the technical aspects of digital archiving were intimidating, as was the fear of inadvertently breaching privacy or security protocols. We provided reassurance by explaining the process and addressing their concerns about sensitive data. This pedagogical approach reduced anxiety and encouraged active participation in the archival process. The campaigns about such simple and structured data increased the perceived quality of our archiving process and methods, and showed that archives are still archives, even those that aren’t covered in dust.

Figure 4: Fly fishing instead of net fishing: results of two collection campaigns based on the partnered collection model at ANLux.

Conclusion

The experiences of the National Archives of the Netherlands and Luxembourg reveal two complementary approaches to social media archiving. In the Netherlands, the focus is on a solid framework, with a living guideline refined through national and international exchanges. This emphasises standardisation, quality criteria, and sustainable formats to build a coherent long-term policy. In Luxembourg, the approach relies on direct content producers’ involvement and a partner-based model. By engaging governmental communication services, ANLux fosters trust, transparency, and collective ownership. This participatory method favors dialogue over automation and opens up pathways for new types of digital collections.

Together, these approaches demonstrate that preserving social media memory requires both structure and partnership, balancing rigor and adaptability in a rapidly evolving digital world. Cross-institutional collaboration has proven its worth. Think of social media archiving as fly fishing: each cast catches something, before moving on to net fishing for other new collections.

Resources

• NANETH Guidelines on Social Media Archiving
• Practice Network Social Media Archiving
• Susanne van den Eijkel, Zefi Kavvadia & Lotte Wijsman. From Theory to Practice: The First Steps in Social Media Archiving. IIPC Web Archiving Conference, Paris, April 26, 2024
• Lotte Wijsman, Geert Leloup, Susanne Van den Eijkel & Sander Wellens. Developing Social Media Archiving Guidelines at the National Archives of the Netherlands, IIPC Web Archiving Conference, Oslo, April 10, 2025
• Preserving Government Social Media in the Netherlands and Luxembourg (Part 1)
• Preserving Government Social Media in the Netherlands and Luxembourg (Part 2)