Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Twitter allows its users to author original content and share links to other web pages. Archivists can mine tweets for these shared URIs, and use those as seeds to create web archive collections. These collections of URIs in social media posts were identified as micro-collections (MCs) by Dr. Alexander Nawala in his study Nwala et al. in 2019. The term micro-collection was given due to the scope and the size of these sets of URIs. Unlike the URIs collected by scraping search engines (e.g., Google), the collections of URIs in social media (e.g., Twitter) are curated by users to specific topics or events. These collections of external web resources reflect the editorial effort and domain expertise of the people using the platform, making them a vital source for seed URIs for web archive collections. However, with the recent changes to the platform ( read more about the changes ), including its rebranding to X , we think that this practice may be diminishing. In this blog post, I repo...