Collecting Social Media in Museums: Six Approaches and a First Step

Try to imagine studying the Renaissance without its art. Now imagine a historian in 2126 trying to understand our era without hashtags, viral videos or online activism. At the Digital Collections Summit, Craig Middleton (State Library of South Australia) and Caroline Wilson-Barnao (University of Queensland) argued that museums can no longer afford to leave social media out of their collections, and offered a practical roadmap for getting started.

Alongside buildings, newspapers and photographs, future historians will need to understand the posts, memes, groups and conversations through which contemporary life is lived.

For Middleton and Wilson-Barnao, co-authors of Collecting Social Media in Museums (Routledge, 2025), the case for collecting this material is clear. The question is why so many museums are still hesitant to act.

Their research found pockets of genuine experimentation across the sector. But it also found a persistent tendency to treat social media as a tool for marketing and engagement rather than a collecting area in its own right. And much of the most innovative work is hard to discover, because the practitioners doing it are too busy doing it to write about it. The book, which takes a curatorial rather than a technical perspective and draws on interviews with ten professionals working in the field, sets out to change that.

Where social history is now being made

Social media has become one of the primary ways we document and share human experience. It’s where people tell personal stories, celebrate milestones, build relationships and make memories.

In moments of crisis, it becomes something more: a real-time record of how events unfold and how people respond. During the COVID-19 pandemic, and through bushfires, floods and other major disruptions, millions of people turned to social media to record what was happening to them, share information with their communities and make sense of how their daily lives were changing.

But the extraordinary is only half the picture. Social media is also where we record the ordinary: what we eat, where we go, who we spend time with, what makes us laugh and what we care about. These seemingly mundane traces will tell future generations a great deal about how we lived, connected and understood the world.

This is where Middleton and Wilson-Barnao issue a challenge to social historians. Traditionally, we might ask which object tells the story of a community. Increasingly, we also need to ask where that community is actually creating and documenting its own history. More and more often, the answer isn’t a physical place at all. It’s an Instagram account, a Facebook group, a TikTok, or the comments beneath a post.

These spaces are not simply records about people’s lives. They are part of people’s lives. They’re where relationships are maintained, identities expressed, communities formed and significant events discussed and remembered. Consider #MeToo: social media didn’t just report the conversation. It was one of the primary places where people shared their experiences, found support and shaped a global discussion about gender, power and accountability.

In other words, social media is no longer just documenting social history. It is one of the places where social history is being lived. And if museums are committed to collecting the experiences, voices and communities that shape society, it becomes very hard to argue that social media sits outside the collecting remit.

So what exactly is a social media object?

Before we can talk about collecting social media, we need to answer a deceptively simple question. One of the book’s central arguments is that social media objects are not simply digital files. They are cultural objects that combine digital content with social interaction.

The authors offer a neat illustration. Record a video on your phone and leave it there, and you have a born-digital object. Publish it to Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, and something changes. The video enters a social environment where it can be viewed, shared, commented on, remixed and argued over. The act of sharing adds a new layer of meaning.

The content itself might be a photograph, a video, a text post, a digital artwork, a piece of music, a hashtag or a platform-specific filter. But much of its significance lies in the context around it. Why was it shared? Who engaged with it? What conversations grew up around it? How did it travel, and on which platform?

A post never exists in isolation. It is shaped by platform design, by the interface people see, by the algorithms that distribute it, and by the comments, likes, shares, replies and remixes that accumulate around it. Those interactions can matter as much as the original post.
That’s what makes collecting so complicated. Unlike a trophy, a hat or a painting, a social media object has no single stable form. The authors argue it is best understood as a complex cultural artefact, created through the interplay of people, platforms, technologies and communities. Recognising that complexity is the first step towards collecting it meaningfully.

The problem of instability

If meaning lives in interactions and context, museums immediately hit a problem: how do you collect something that never stops changing?

Social media objects are inherently unstable. A post can be edited, deleted, remixed or stripped of context within minutes. Comments and conversations vanish. Accounts are suspended. Entire platforms decline, transform or shut down. Vine is the cautionary tale here: the platform disappeared, but the communities, creativity and cultural significance it hosted remain an important part of our collective history.

Museums are therefore preserving more than a photograph or a block of text: relationships, audiences, platform features and an evolving digital environment all form part of the object’s context.

For Middleton and Wilson-Barnao, that settles the matter. The question is no longer whether social media belongs in museum collections, but how to collect it in ways that are ethical, practical, sustainable and meaningful.

You don’t have to collect the internet

For many museum professionals, this is the point where the conversation becomes paralysing. The archivist in all of us instinctively thinks: we need to collect everything. We don’t, we can’t, and we shouldn’t.

The internet is enormous, and museums don’t need to become a comprehensive archive of it. Social media should be approached like every other area of collecting: selectively, intentionally and in line with the institution’s mission.

So rather than asking “How do we collect social media?”, the authors suggest better questions:

• What stories matter to our institution?
• Whose voices are missing from our collections?
• Which communities and experiences are now being documented online?

The goal is not comprehensiveness. The goal is representation.

A museum documenting the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, doesn’t need every post created during that period. It might focus instead on healthcare workers, local communities, small business owners or online support groups whose experiences illuminate a bigger story. That could mean collecting a particular account, documenting an online community, preserving responses to a significant event or working directly with creators.

In short, collecting social media isn’t really about collecting platforms. It’s about collecting people, experiences, communities and culture, wherever they are being expressed. And crucially, it can’t wait until the material becomes “historical”, because by then it may already be gone.

Six ways museums are already doing it

The good news is that museums, libraries and archives around the world are already experimenting. Looking across the examples gathered for the book, the authors found that while every project was different, they clustered around six broad approaches.

1. Automated archiving
Web archiving tools, crawlers and automated capture technologies collect content directly from the web, often at scale. This works well for documenting major events, movements, organisations or significant online communities. The trade-off: it can struggle to preserve the social interactions and context that give content its meaning.

2. Donated data and content
Instead of taking material from platforms, institutions invite individuals and communities to contribute it themselves: posts, digital photographs, account data or other personal digital heritage. Voluntary participation can help address a donor’s consent and strengthen relationships with communities. It does not automatically resolve the rights or privacy of other people represented in replies, photographs or shared content.

3. Collecting without collecting
Here the focus shifts from preserving the content to documenting people’s experiences of social media, through oral histories, interviews, community consultations and stories about how social media shaped an event, a movement or everyday life. The emphasis is on meaning and lived experience rather than on keeping every post.

4. Collecting directly from social media
Museums identify significant content on platforms and work with its creators to acquire it. Think of someone who documented a natural disaster, a community recovery effort or an experience that would otherwise be absent from the historical record. Often, the relationship with the creator becomes as important as the content itself.

5. Third-party service provision
Given the scale and complexity of digital preservation, many institutions simply don’t have the in-house resources to go it alone. External vendors, technology providers and specialist preservation services can make collecting possible, or at least make it possible to get started.

6. Simulation
Rather than preserving a platform exactly as it was, simulation recreates aspects of the social media experience: rebuilt interfaces, recreated user interactions, or exhibitions that help audiences understand how platforms shape communication, behaviour and culture. The aim is to interpret aspects of the experience, not just retain the content. Label recreated features and gaps so visitors can distinguish the simulation from a complete original platform record.

These approaches aren’t mutually exclusive. Many institutions combine several, depending on the stories they want to tell and the communities they work with. The framework is intended as a starting point for working out where social media fits in your own collecting practice.

The hard questions

The opportunities are significant, but so are the challenges. Collecting social media isn’t just a technical exercise; it raises ethical, legal and practical questions that museums must navigate carefully. The authors highlighted three.

Platforms were never built to be archives

Social media companies have become inadvertent custodians of an enormous body of cultural heritage, yet their platforms were never designed to function as archives. Features disappear, companies fail and content can be removed with little warning. Much of our digital culture is therefore vulnerable to loss, which gives museums an imperative to identify and preserve significant material before it goes.

Copyright, consent and privacy

Just because content is publicly available doesn’t mean its creator expected it to end up in a museum collection. Questions of ownership, consent and privacy sit at the heart of this work. The tension is sharpest around the so-called right to be forgotten: an individual may have legitimate reasons for wanting content removed, while a museum may regard that same content as historically significant.

Navigating these competing interests takes careful judgement and clear policies that weigh the public value of preservation against the rights of the people represented. Transparency, robust consent processes and clear collecting policies are essential for building trust.

Read more about planning responsible personal-data use.

Synthetic media

Artists, creators and online communities are already using AI-generated images, video and text as forms of creative expression. As this work becomes more common, it raises fresh questions about authenticity, provenance, authorship and trust. Museums will increasingly need to collect and interpret AI-shaped content while helping audiences understand how it was made.

Six principles to guide your practice

Across the case studies and interviews, six core principles emerged. The authors are clear these aren’t rigid rules, but practical guideposts for institutions beginning this work.

1. Acknowledge the importance of digital cultural heritage. Social media isn’t trivial or a secondary form of culture. It’s where millions of people document their lives and respond to the events shaping their world. Take it seriously, and put it in your collecting plan.
2. Don’t collect everything. Be intentional rather than comprehensive. Focus on material aligned with your mission, priorities and communities. Success is measured by relevance and representation, not volume.
3. Don’t wait. Content is vulnerable to deletion, platform change and technical obsolescence. Act while material is still accessible, and be ready to adapt as platforms and user behaviour evolve.
4. Experiment quickly, frequently and widely. There’s no single best-practice model. Test different approaches, learn from what works and what doesn’t, and share those lessons with the sector.
5. Seek consent, with a risk-positive approach. Transparency and collaboration with creators should be priorities wherever possible. But an overly cautious approach can mean important contemporary history is lost. Ethical collecting here means balancing opportunity with responsibility through documented rights, privacy and access decisions; a risk-positive approach is not permission to ignore them.
6. Embrace change and redefine control. Social media objects live within platforms, networks and communities that keep evolving, and they’ll go on having a life even after you collect them. Rather than seeking complete control, accept that change is an inherent characteristic of digital heritage.

Plan a bounded first project

A manageable first project starts with one collecting question and a community the museum already has a reason to work with. Agree what will be selected, why it matters and which surrounding context is needed to understand it. A post alone may not explain the conversation or the conditions in which it appeared.

Discuss acquisition and access separately. A creator may be willing to donate material without agreeing to unrestricted public display, and a post can include other people’s contributions. Record those decisions, any restrictions and how the museum will respond to later concerns.

Give the pilot a preservation owner and a review date. Record what was captured, how and when, along with omissions or recreated elements. The authors’ framework makes room for different methods; the museum’s documentation should make its own choices understandable.

Read more about documenting choices in digital collection projects.

Will we act in time?

Collecting Social Media in Museums doesn’t claim to offer a single solution to a complex challenge. What it does is recognise that social media has become one of the spaces where contemporary life is lived, documented and remembered, and give museums the frameworks and examples to respond.

As Middleton and Wilson-Barnao put it, the real question for museums is whether we’ll act early enough to make sure those traces remain part of the historical record.

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Craig Middleton is based at the State Library of South Australia and Caroline Wilson-Barnao at the University of Queensland. Their book, Collecting Social Media in Museums, is published by Routledge. This article is adapted from their presentation at the Digital Collections Summit.