The confusion surrounding how federal agencies should archive social media records is, believe it or not, not entirely a bad thing.

It means that innovation is outpacing regulation, which is what innovation is meant to do.

A recent report prepared by a special interest group of the Fairfax, Va.-based American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council finds generally robust embrace of social media tools in the nine federal agencies examined, including the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services and NASA. (I'm not sure why the report defined RSS as a social media tool, since RSS--while exceedingly useful--is unilateral in mode and old as Methuselah in web terms. If RSS is a social media tool, are web browsers, too? But I quibble.)

The report also finds Paleolithic-seeming archiving practices, the worst offender of which might be the DoD, which prints out electronically generated content and preserves a dead-tree version for the archives. (Does the Army print out all the online chat interactions with Sgt. Star, including the time when I accidentally made him get angry?)  

But here we come to the crux of the matter, of why many agencies react with perplexity to questions of social media archiving. Social media by its nature is resistant to archiving, since the tools for social media content generally 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. As the report notes, federal workers are already resistant to caring about record keeping to the extent of identifying emails for archiving purposes, so it would be difficult to get them to manually add tags.

In short, social media has leaped ahead of current policy and technological tools, besides the printer, which is even older than RSS. That's a problem, but I'm glad it's one the federal government has--since the alternative would be to do no social media outreach until archiving policy and technology are in place. Archivists, I know, are chortling at the very notion that such a state would exist in federal government since archivists tend to be an embattled group near the end of many queues of lifted rice bowls.

But whether it's because archivists lack power or because the government has permitted itself to embrace something new without first subjecting it to yet another review process, the fact remains that the government has permitted an innovative thing to grow without stifling it in the cradle for lack of regulatory compliance.

Now, that said, it's obviously time for an archiving solution to present itself since social media has passed the stage of pure newness, passing instead into greater degrees of normality. But the fact that the government hasn't come up with a solution to date is not a matter of hang-wringing or failure. It's a good sign that the government is willing to let innovation be innovation, even within federal agencies. - Dave