At the CILIP 2.0 open meeting in London (29th April 2009) delegates and remote participants were encouraged to tweet, using the #cilip2 tag, on issues relating to the role of Web 2.0 for CILIP members. These tweets were displayed on a screen using the Twitterfall client. Twitterfall is a way of viewing the latest ‘tweets’ of upcoming trends and custom searches on Twitter. Updates fall from the top of the page in near-realtime. The client is also a great way for remote participants to keep up-to-date with event posts.
Use of the tag was very popular and a number of blog posts have been written about its success including CILIP: More Popular Than Swine Flu!, Twittering Librarians, Twitter – better than a conference, and CILIP 2.0 – Open Session.
Why?
Some might argue that the significant use of the tag could turn out to be a defining moment in CILIP’s movement towards engagement with Web 2.0. Those with an eye for preservation might argue that if this is the case we will want to preserve the tweets that embody this ‘crucial moment’.
How?
Luckily help was on hand in the form of Dave Pattern, systems manager at the University of Huddersfield Library. After the event Dave provided a good example of rapid software development (or in his words “a quick and dirty hack“!) when he quickly wrote a piece of software to harvest the tweets and make available a transcript of them. Dave used the Twitter search API to fetch the results (in JSON format) of the #cilip2 tag every 60 seconds. He then had to dedupe the results from the previous seaches. Once he’d got all the tweets he wrote a quick Perl script to process them and generate some HTML.
He also provided a Wordle visualisation of the content of the tweets.
This now means that the CILIP community continue to have access to:
- A record of the discussions, annotated with the time of posting.
- A Wordle cloud which provides a visual summary of the topics.
Software such as this could potentially be used by others to preserve tweets. For those interested Dave is happy to share the code.
If does however raise a number of questions: Should you keep a record of Twitter posts? If so, how would you go about doing it? Where should the responsibility lay? Should it be something event organisers need to consider? Is there a role for commercial companies to play or will this type of preservation just fall at the feet of interested participants (those keen on mashup creation)?
Is there scope for some sort of tool to be developed in this area? Should funding councils in specific areas be funding the creation of a more managed service? Should the tools be more generalised?
Some suggestions are already provided in the Handbook and on the JISC PoWR blog:
This blog post provides the background for one of two case studies which will be displayed on a poster on Preservation Policies and Approaches for Use of Social Web Services to be presented at the Missing links: the enduring web workshop to be held on Tuesday 21st July 2009 at the at the British Library Conference Centre, London.
You can just favorite it. Why go for preserving. You can keep it favorited until the news from the tweet fades, which eventually does in all the scenario.