Navy official: 'snapshots' not good archiving plan.

• Position: SOCIAL MEDIA

Snapshots" of social media content are not sufficient records, according to the director of records at the Department of the Navy, Charley Barth.

Federal agencies that are simply capturing an image of social media content hosted by third parties don't have a sufficient archiving strategy, said Barth.

Since October 2010, the National Archives and Records Administration (SARA) has stipulated that social media records should be archived, including those hosted by third parties. That means agency content on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube is a record if the platforms add value beyond what is available on government-hosted communications. That content also requires a records schedule, according to NARA.

According to Fiercegovernment.com, Barth leads the Federal Records Council's social media subgroup, which submitted a whitepaper recommending the following Gov. 2.0 archiving policies to SARA. The recommendations advised agencies to:

* Copy and paste social media record content into a Microsoft Word document and in a .pdf format and save it to a records management application (RMA)

* Copy and paste social media record content into a Word document and in a .pdf format and save it to a share drive, hard drive, or something other than the RMA

* Use a really simple syndication (RSS) feed to collect information into an RSS aggregator, such as Google Reader

* Use an RSS feed to pull information into an e-mail account and save the record in an RMA

* Use one of...