Administration issues solicitation to archive social media content

The Obama administration issued a solicitation in August for a contractor to archive the increasing amount of information published online that qualifies as presidential records.

The White House wants an automated process to capture, extract and store information posted by employees in the Executive Office of the President on publicly accessible Web sites, including social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, according to the solicitation posted on FedBizOps and dated Aug. 21. The contractor will be responsible for archiving comments on pages the White House creates and messages sent to the office on those sites.

The notice specified the contract applies to offices subject to the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which requires the White House to preserve the president's records and communications. It notes that the White House already is capturing and restoring communications on several social networking sites, including MySpace and Vimeo.

The system must be easy to organize and search captured information, and the contractor would be responsible for ensuring the records are transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration in an acceptable format. NARA did not respond to a request for comment by the time this story was posted.

The notice signals that the administration is taking presidential records requirements more seriously than the Bush administration, said Patrice McDermott, a former NARA employee and current director of OpenGovernment.org, a nonprofit coalition of more than 70 organizations that promote government openness and accountability.

"It's a very good sign that, unlike the previous administration, this administration is taking its responsibilities very serious and trying to deal with issues of new media," McDermott said.

The Bush administration drew criticism for scrapping the e-mail archiving system established under President Clinton and not replacing it. As a result, gaps exist in the record of White House e-mails. Bush staffers also were criticized for using Republican National Committee e-mail accounts to conduct government business. "Disdain is probably the best word for how the previous administration approached their responsibilities," McDermott said.

The amount of information to store has increased because the White House has embraced social media platforms to take its messages to the public. While the administration's use of blogs, Twitter, Facebook and online town halls has expanded its ability to engage with the public, it also presents more formats to capture and store for archivists tasked with preserving presidential communications.

"I think it's a whole new world for both agencies and the national archives," McDermott said. "We've seen a massive expansion in a very short period of time in the kinds of materials and volumes that will need to be dealt with."

Archiving social media content can be particularly challenging, because many sites were developed recently and are evolving. Twitter, for instance, archives all a user's Tweets, but they < a href=http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_ways_to_archive_your_tweets.php>are not searchable after a few days. McDermott said preserving online town halls and YouTube videos would be another challenge that federal agencies haven't faced before.

The solicitation also prompted speculation in the conservative blogosphere that the Obama administration plans to harvest citizens' personal information from social networking sites. The solicitation, however, explicitly restricts the archiving to comments and messages that are sent to the White House or posted on one of the agency's Web pages.