Last week the Cultural News at Swedish public service television broadcasted an interview with Elisabeth Boogh at Stockholms läns museum. The interview starts by stating that it was only a matter of time before cultural heritage institutions would start collecting from social media. Memories in form of photo albums, diaries and letters are readily found the archives and museums, but they are no longer much in use and instead what gets posted on social media becomes part of our memories.
We talked about how and what museums and archives should collect from social media, and also how essential it is that we use different methods for collecting. If we should choose to only collect images from a specific social media the collective memory of our time would be somewhat loop-sided, only portraying the good times of life and not the downsides. Therefore we need to reach out and collect a broad perspective of photographs, hashtags and comments, and the methods of collecting have to be both user-generated and curated.