Collecting social media content can be viewed as a type of web archiving, but it has some distinguishing features that call for more specialized software tools. Social Feed Manager (SFM), open-source software developed by the George Washington University Libraries with the support of grants from the Institute for Museum and Library Services and the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission, is designed specifically to enable archivists and researchers to build collections of social media data.SFM provides the ability to collect content from Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr; this project's grant from CEAL supported the GW's development of a new Sina Weibo module for SFM to enable this and potential future Weibo archiving efforts. After selecting and following particular Weibo accounts that were likely to have posts discussing the anti-corruption campaign, SFM has harvested roughly 63,000 Weibo posts since mid-2016; the collection continues to grow.
For more details about Social Feed Manager, please visit the George Washington University Library's SFM page.
