1. Hello to everyone on the #phstmu page. I hope everyone is enjoying the beginning of their weekend! This week, with assistance from the Documenting the Now Project, I want to delve into the ethical issues surrounding assembling a collection from social media websites.

2. There are a number of ethical issues to consider when assembling a collection from social media platforms. For the sake of brevity I will not dive into all of them in this thread, but I will focus on the issues of lack of user awareness of how their data can be used...

3. And the difficulty of applying traditional archival practices to social media content. The first issue, that of user awareness of how their data is being used (or informed consent), should always be considered by archivists assembling a collection from social media platforms.

4. Archivists have a responsibility to not only be knowledgeable about informed consent on social media, but they should also educate other users about how their social media data may be used. Especially because these users may one day become "collection donors" to archives.

5. It is important that social media users understand how their data can be used especially by third parties such as companies or researchers. I'm sure what we share online would change if we better understood what we were agreeing to when we created our social media profiles.

6. Applying traditional archival practices to social media content can be challenging for many archivists. But, there are many ethical standards that can be adopted or adapted for social media centered archival work.

For example, archivists who are working with social media should, "engage and work with the communities they wish to document." Also, "When possible, archivists should apply traditional archival practices such as apraisal, collection development, and donor relations to projects."

8. The ethical standards above can, and should, be applied in both traditonal and social media focused archives. The source and inspirtation for this thread comes from the Doc Now White Paper by Bergis Jules, Ed Summers, and Dr. Vernon Mitchell. To read the paper click this link

9. https://www.docnow.io/docs/docnow-whitepaper-2018.pdf The qoutes for this thread were taken from the reccomendations section on the last page of the paper.

In conclusion, there are still ethical questions that remain about archiving social media and web posts, but that doesn't mean that there isn't common ground between archivists who collect online material and those that work in more traditonal settings. Thanks for reading!