Via Mashable, the Obama administration is looking to hire an archivist to capture the communications going out via social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, to comply with the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
Sure, the front page of Whitehouse.gov lists 1600 Pennsylvania Ave as the contact information -- but click through and you're invited to "stay connected" to the administration via Facebook, Vimeo, and Flickr, among others. And, as Christina Warren at Mashable notes, "This content, plus the comments and replies associated with them (think letters to the President) all need to be archived under the PRA." You begin to see the scale of information that needs to be captured.
As I noted in my article on the closing of GeoCities, the question of archiving what we put online is one we ignore at our peril. What makes the White House's hunt for a digital archivist so intriguing is that it points to the fact that when it comes to archiving the digital commons, there are multiple interested parties. The history of tweets around, say, the public option is not just one for historians, but for activists, politicians, and yes, those who would keep tabs on presidential conduct.
(h/t Jessica Clark)
--Phoebe Connelly
