Self-Archiving
Self-archiving is the practice of organizing and maintaining one’s materials in an accessible manner. The benefit of self-archiving besides organization is that the materials are typically created by the individual/party doing the organization. With this in mind, the individual/party can add important information to the materials including names of people in photographs, context to certain forms or flyers, dates, and/or locations. The type of materials one can self-archive can be physical or digital.
Social Media & Websites
Web archiving is the process of collecting and preserving web content. As the internet can change at any given moment, web archiving aims to capture what you can find online before it changes or disappears. Through these captures, we can view the original appearance of social media or websites in addition to future iterations.
Use Webrecorder to Preserve Websites of Social Media
Born-digital material is content like recordings of websites or social media. Webrecorder, also known as ArchiveWeb.page, is a user-friendly archiving tool added as a Chrome Extension. You can find the link here: https://tinyurl.com/4kyhkpd2
Start Recording
If you want to capture your social media page, like Instagram, or your website, simply go to the page, press Auto-Pilot, and then Start on the Webrecorder Chrome Extension. After you click Start on the page you wish to archive, the extension will show an ochre square and a number. While ochre, Webrecorder is in the process of being archived. Wait until the square in the extension turns green before loading a new page. With Autopilot on, you will not need to scroll the page yourself. If you wish to archive links found on the page, feel free to click them and wait again for the extension to turn green. Click Stop when you finished recording the pages you wish to archive.
Finding Your Recorded Pages
You can find the pages you have recorded when you click the Home icon on the Chrome extension. This is where you will find your recordings and be able to make necessary edits. You can create a new archive, which is essentially a different folder for different materials. For social media archiving, you will most likely only need one archive to save to. Having only one archive will make recording more simple. Once you click on your archive page, you can see exactly which pages were successfully recorded. You can download the files known as, WARC files, here or back at the Home page. Click Download as WARC 1.1 Only. You can rename the file for easier access. These files can be uploaded to your cloud-based storage system.
