Following and later cataloging social media posts in the midst of crisis

As social media is being used for following news as it happens more and more, I found the article Preserving the voices of revolution: Examining the creation and preservation of a subject-centered collection of tweets from the eighteen days in Egypt by Timothy Arnold and Walker Sampson to be interesting because it helps lay the ground work for librarians to collect and catalog it. The authors followed Tweets that were created by protesters that were about when, and where protests may occur when president Mubarik gave up his presidency. Following the Tweets also gave the authors a sense of how the general public was reacting to the political change and whether corruption was suspected. This could let historians and sociologists, analyze President Mubarik's popularity or lack there of. The authors then categorized them by language, and location where the Tweets were sent. It will be interesting to see how social media is integrated into library collections, we have certainly learned to catalog multimedia items. Some of the issues that could arise with putting Tweets into library collections could be privacy invasion and inaccurate information. 
 
In light of the recent attacks in Paris, this article jumped out at me because many people in Belgium started to Tweet and Facebook pictures of their cats so that the locations of police were hidden and those suspected of terrorist activities would not have warning. I do not know if it worked, but it is intriguing to think about how we can impact current events through Tweets and Facebook. 

Colleen 

Arnold, T., & Sampson, W. (2014). Preserving the voices of revolution: Examining the creation     and preservation of a subject-centered collection of tweets from the eighteen days in egypt         Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=llf&AN=100013053&site=ehost-  live