8 Conclusion and future work
While this reenvisioned approach to social media collecting is exploratory, thus far it has been borne out by the progress we have made in rewriting SFM. Along with further software development and experience, we hope to benefit from the scrutiny of researchers, archivists, the web archiving community, and other potential users of social media collections. With the release of version 1.0 of SFM, we have been working to provide test instances to willing representatives of these groups to spark adoption and gather feedback. As outlined in our development roadmap,19 there is still substantial work to be performed on SFM, as follows:
• Better operationalization, including improved monitoring and logging.
• Continued refinement of usability.
• Exposing the provenance metadata as required by researchers.
Though not yet on the development roadmap, some additional work beckons such as Web-like access to social media data as described above. In addition, there are other techniques from web archiving that might be considered, such as using CDX indexes for WARC files to speed access to social media data. Beyond development, one area where we see great promise in aligning social media collecting with web archiving is the opportunity to jointly engage in a conversation with social media researchers and archivists about how to support quality research and robust archives. As historians and other researchers use web archives, their experiences contribute to future requirements. We hope to see this discussion lead to establishing best practices and standards for social media data collection. Further, this understanding will inform future work on some of the more speculative areas discussed above, such as approaches to access and discovery of collected content, data visualization, and other forms of analysis of social media and web archives.
