White House preserves social media content.

• Position: OPEN RECORDS

To comply with Presidential Records Act (PRA) requirements, the Obama administration has announced plans to archive content posted to social media sites where the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has a presence, including Facebook and Twitter.

It is seeking service providers and a social media archivist to assist in the task. The contractor must be able to capture, store, extract to approved formats, and transfer to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) all content associated with the sites. Capture and storage must include text, graphics, audio, and video in any existing file format that is uploaded to the site or created directly on the site. The content must be captured (and later displayed) in context, and it must be stored and transferred in such a way that will allow relationships among record content, associated comments, and related objects to be kept just as they were on the web page at the time of capture.

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EOP officials want to capture the posted content at least twice a day, according to a notice posted by the administration seeking private firms to take on the project. In addition, officials said the provider will have to organize and filter the data, make it searchable, and provide a web-based tool that government employees can use to manage the records. Currently, EOP social media content is captured using application program interfaces and daily screen shots.

Critics have accused the White House of a lack of transparency and of collecting web users' data and comments without notice or consent; however, the effort is required by the PRA. Passed in 1978 in response to former President...