A two-year, $517,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will fund a joint project called "Documenting the Now: Supporting Scholarly Use and Preservation of Social Media Content." The project — a collaboration between The University of California, Riverside, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland — responds to the public’s use of social media for chronicling historically significant events and demand from scholars and archivists seeking a user-friendly means of collecting and preserving this digital content.

The three institutions will develop DocNow – a cloud-ready, open-source application that will be used for collecting tweets and their associated metadata and Web content. The app will be specifically designed to help authenticated users tap into Twitter streams to identify web content that is of value for current and future research.

Bergis Jules, co-principal investigator and community lead at UC Riverside, hopes the DocNow project will be a catalyst for community building around the scholarly use and preservation of social media archives. "Community building will be vitally important as we continue to develop standards and effective practices around the collection and access to this rich content," said Jules. "I'm excited The Mellon Foundation is supporting this project as it will be an important contribution to scholarship on social media archiving."

The grant also supports the development of best practice recommendations for ethical, copyright, privacy, and access issues related to collection of social media content.