When many agencies capture social media records for archiving--to the extent they do--they do so by printing out the content onto paper and storing that, finds a report from an industry advisory group.

The report, released April 1 and prepared by a special interest group of the Fairfax, Va.-based American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council, incorporates information gleaned from interviews with officials from nine federal agencies, and also from the city of Washington, D.C.

The interviews show that while many agencies have enthusiastically embraced social media--the Defense Department's acumen extends to a presence in virtual worlds--they've done a less good job of figuring out how to archive social media. DoD is among the agencies that takes a "print and file" approach of transferring electronically-generated content onto paper, the report states.

Except for the GAO, federal agencies examined in the report generally haven't implemented an enterprisewide electronic records management system.

The U.S. Geological Survey saves its social media content "across all formats for future reproduction," the report says--but neither is 100 percent retention a best record keeping practice, the report notes; not all records are meant to be archived. Officials from the Environmental Protection Agency and Health and Human Services Department also told report authors they also tend toward the save-everything approach. EPA officials said they'd do something different once "the retention logistics are worked out and schedules applied to the records."

Social media by its nature is resistant to archiving, federal officials told report authors, since the tools for its social media content vernally don't enable content capture. In addition it's not obvious when a social media record exactly begins or ends and nor is it always apparent when a social media artifact is ready for archiving, since comments might be able to be posted indefinitely.

Also, social media tools are mostly beyond agency control, which also means that when social media content is captured for archiving, agency staff must manually affix metadata tags for search and retrieval purposes. With federal workers already resistant to caring about record keeping to the extent identifying emails for archiving purposes, it would be difficult to get them to add tags, the report says.

"The weakest link of record keeping in the electronic age is the fact that everyone is his/her own record keeper. All agencies interviewed said it is difficult to enforce policies for capturing and tagging records of all kinds," it states.

For more:
- download the report, "Best Practices Study of Social Media Records Policies," by the ACT-IAC collaboration & transformation shared interest group (.pdf)

Related Articles:
Ferriero: Electronic records archiving in crisis 
NARA: Most agencies at risk of bad records management 
GAO: NARA archives system would cost up to $1 billion to complete