While archives and archivists have long liked to believe that we are neutral in the process of building collections, we know this is not true. Traces of the archivists hand can be seen in the arrangement and description of collections, but often not in the appraisal, though this may have the largest impact on what information is available within a research collection. In Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid, Michele Light and Tom Hyry make an important argument for why documenting appraisal decisions and publicizing them through annotation in finding aids can be useful. They state, “Indeed, our personal, professional, political, and cultural biases are most obvious, and controversial, in the practice of selection and appraisal, and the profession has been struggling with these issues for more than a generation.”

Appraisal decisions are not often transparent in finding aids, as Kathrine M. Wisser and Jackie Dean found in analysis of Encoded Archival Description tag usage. Only 4.8% of the encoded finding aids in their study of over one thousand used the <appraisal> element. This presents as a significant gap in sharing knowledge about collection decisions considering how much our own biases, the political climate, or institutional policies may influence those choices. There are many potential reasons for the omission of an appraisal note, including a dearth of documentation from accession, lack of an appraisal process at all, internal institutional decision making, or perceived insignificance of the metadata field. There is also great opportunity to correct this gap, particularly when archivists are actively engaged in documenting the now. As Sam Cross explains in Archivists on the Issues: The Neutrality Lie and Archiving in the Now archivists have a mandate to actively collect, which means we are making appraisal decisions and can document them and their impact along the way.

The DocNow team is dedicated to helping archivists and researchers ethically create collections of social media data, particularly Twitter data. When archivists decide what to collect from Twitter they begin the appraisal process of identifying relevant hashtags, users, timelines, and locations for creating collections. As they do this work it’s important that they can easily build a log of searches and decisions, and have a space to annotate their decision making process. This form of documentation can then be used to help write the appraisal section of the finding aid. We are excited to be able to provide this feature for added transparency, but know the community must also come together to help build standards for how to describe appraisal of social media content in finding aids.

We are still in the early days of archives creating finding aids for collections with social media data, and there are no set guidelines for how to describe a tweet ID dataset. A pioneering early example is the finding aid for the US-Cuba Policy Change Twitter Archive, 2014–2015 from the University of Miami Cuban Heritage Collection, which clearly lists in the both the Abstract and Scope and Contents which hashtags were captured, the date range, and the restrictions placed by Twitter’s API and terms of service. The collection, built in 2014, was created using the command-line Twarc tool and is served up to an internal community as a full dataset, rather than just the tweet IDs. Without more recent tools like DocNow’s Hydrator this was the only easy way to share the data. This information, along with the decision making process to capture the six hashtags specified, and what Twitter’s Streaming API rate was at time of capture, could be added to an appraisal note to enhance understanding of what is in the collection and why.

Another encouraging example is the work of the Progressive Librarians Guild Toronto Area Chapter. Their #freedaleaskey collection includes a general appraisal note explaining their interests in building the collection. The Twitter feed in Series 03 explains method of capture and each tweet ID set describes what hashtag was captured, the date range, and the number of tweets. Furthermore, the tweets are displayed online as well as available for download.

These early finding aids describing and sharing Twitter content also bring up the important question of sustainability for access within finding aids — as technologies and the Twitter API and terms of service change, archivists will have to review and maintain finding aids to ensure the collections are still accessible. This is a new challenge for archivists that could add considerably to workloads over time.

With this new and important work going on in the archivist community, we look forward to discussing the value of appraisal transparency, tackling the appraisal issues inherent in social media data, and developing best practices for highlighting the non-neutrality of the archivist to best contextualize collections. We hope to host conversations on these topics soon, so look out for details!