Posted on May 7, 2010
In August 2009, the Archival Platform started a Twitter account (@the_archive), posting comments and links about archives and heritage in Africa. Since the South African archive and heritage sector currently uses Twitter very little, why do we invest time and energy on it?
What is Twitter?
Started in 2006, Twitter was perhaps an unlikely success as an online social networking tool. Twitter asked people to record what they were doing in a 140 character public sms (a tweet) that was broadcast into the digital ether. According to Wikipedia,1 Twitter "emphasised their news and information network strategy in November 2009 by changing the question it asks users for status updates from 'What are you doing?' to 'What's happening?'". Twitter is famously popular as a source of entertainment trivia, although it has also been important in politics (Barack Obama's campaign and the 2009 Iranian election) and breaking news (such as the 2008 Mumbai attacks). People who sign up to Twitter can send their own tweets, follow others' tweets (or lists of people's tweets), and search all current tweets.
Twitter now has about 100-million users worldwide and in excess of 50-million tweets per day2.
There is considerable potential for growth in the South African Twitter field. Only about 55 000 Twitter users are in South Africa, which generates 1.5-million tweets per month. Most of these people are not directly employed in the archives or heritage sector although a number are artists, architects or musicians. Most tweet about everyday activity and social life. On average, South African Twitter accounts now have about 115 followers and a total of 346 tweets.
How the Archival Platform uses Twitter
Although we have Africa-based followers, and follow a number of them including David Worth, the Archival Platform currently mainly uses Twitter as a source of information from the international archives and museum community, and as a way of foregrounding work being done in the African archive sector within the international community of professionals. It's a perfect brainstorming and query tool on matters of common professional interest. In the future we hope that Twitter can be used also to learn from and engage more local professionals, government representatives and the public in general on matters of archival interest.
Reading tweets involves some special codes but this is not hard to do once you have started trying. RT@xx means you are sending on, or retweeting, xx's tweets; website addresses are often shortened to fit them into the 140 character limit so they look a bit strange.
Here is an example of some of our recent tweets:
Landscapes, an iPhone application under development, will aid assessment & inventorying of historic landscapes http://bit.ly/dzyXJ9
RT@ICCROM Grants, fellowships, internships in #cultural #heritage #conservation - check out ICCROM's classifieds! http://bit.ly/9p3EI2
RT@radiotwok: Zuma says the appointment of 20 new commissioners to the National Planning Commission will make state policies more coherent
sudden spike in web activity on AP archive users blog - not sure what's driving it but the attention is most welcome! http://bit.ly/djgPLe
Gr8 visualising archival content through word frequencies but how does one ensure a focus on content-related words? http://bit.ly/gmq2A
Although initially we simply channelled Facebook updates through Twitter, in 2010 we began to use it in a more focused way. From February 2010, our followers increased substantially.
By the end of April 2010 we had nearly 140 followers and had posted over 700 tweets, sharing links and making comments on matters of common interest; we were also being followed by 15 Twitter lists. We were in the top 20% of most influential Twitter feeds on the wefollow heritage list and in the top 30% of the competitive archives list, although our ranking on the much larger museums list was only at 50%. 4
The most exciting discussions in our sector on Twitter to date have been about archives, specifically on digitisation issues, which informed my April blog on the involvement of users in digitisation processes.5
This blog was promoted by our Twitter followers and received over 460 pageviews during April, making it the most popular page on our site besides the home page. This is helping to make people on other continents aware of the work being done, and the issues affecting, the archive sector in Africa. We look forward to benefiting further from Twitter in 2010.
1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Content_of_tweets
2http://blog.twitter.com/2010/02/measuring-tweets.html
3http://www.fuseware.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/SA-Twitter-Report-2010.pdf
4http://wefollow.com/the_archive
5http://www.archivalplatform.org/blog/entry/involve_users/
Harriet Deacon, former director of the Archival Platform is now an independent heritage consultant, and a correspondent for the platform