The Archiving Social Media conference at George Mason University brought scholars, archivists, and Web developers together on Friday to discuss the preservation of data now whizzing around the Internet on blogs and networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Demand for Web archives has grown as social media has become part of the fabric of social history. At the conference, participants talked about the challenge of documenting social media from a variety of angles, such as copyright, ethics, and how the archives will be used.

"This was really intended as a first conversation," said Tom Scheinfeldt, managing director of George Mason's Center for History and New Media, and a research assistant professor of history at GMU. "We have a better sense of the kind of work that would need to be done."

Mr. Scheinfeldt said the conference was inspired by the impact that social media has had in...

That's Archivist with a capital A, as in the person who heads up the National Archives and Records Administration. The latest person to hold that position is David S. Ferriero, who became AOTUS (Archivist of the United States) in November 2009. Mr. Ferriero used to be the director of the New York Public Libraries, and it looks like he has brought some of that public-outreach sensibility to his new role.

He's blogging, for one thing. (Imagine his predecessors doing that.) AOTUS: Collector in Chief debuted last week with the tagline "The Archivist's Take on Transparency, Collaboration, and Participation at the National Archives."

In his first post, Mr. Ferriero lays out (a little drily, it must be said) his aim to have NARA "reclaim its records management role." He emphasizes that "we understand that electronic records are now a fundamental part of our documentary record." And, he says, ...

The Samaritans of biblical fame still exist, although their numbers are small: The current community, split between Holon, Israel, and Mount Gerizim in the West Bank, numbers just over 700 people. In 1901, a Michigan industrialist named E.K. Warren traveled to the Middle East and was asked to bring home a collection of sacred Samaritan objects for safekeeping. The objects include prayer books and centuries-old versions of the Samaritan Pentateuch, or Torah, which has some significant differences from the Jewish Pentateuch. The collection has been housed ever since at Michigan State University.

In 2007, as a graduate student at Michigan State, James Ridolfo came across an electronic index to the collection. He got in touch with a Samaritan elder, Binyamin Tsedaka, who had been asking Michigan State to “promote Samaritan studies.”  Working with William Hart-Davidson, co-director of...

More than 41,000 Spanish-language songs that go back to the early 1900s were placed online this week by the Chicano Studies Center, a research unit at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The recordings are from the Arhoolie Foundation’s Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings, the Los Angeles Times reported. It is the largest repository of Mexican and Mexican-American vernacular recordings in existence. The early works, the archives say, are “the foundation for Latino music today, since the singers and musicians who made these records helped popularize and propagate a number of traditions, including regional Mexican, Tejano, Chicano, and Mexican-American music.”

If you are not physically at UCLA, however, don’t expect to hear all the music. Due to copyright restrictions, only campus computers get full access. Off-campus users can hear 50...

Part of an occasional series of conversations about digital archives.

In the early 1860s, Walt Whitman wrote a poem, never finished, called “The Vault at Pfaff’s,” about a New York City saloon where “where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse.” Those “drinkers and laughers” included creative types like Whitman, the actor and writer Ada Clare, William Dean Howells, and Henry Clapp Jr., whose literary weekly, The Saturday Press, published fiction, poetry, and social commentary turned out by the “Pfaff’s bohemians” in the 1850s and 1860s.

You can find biographies of about 150 Pfaffians and an annotated bibliography of about 4,000 of their literary works at the Vault at Pfaff’s, an online archive dedicated to the collective creative scene Whitman described in his poem. The site went live in 2006. The...

In the mid-1990s, Ed Folsom, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, and another scholar, Kenneth M. Price, set out to create a digital scholarly edition of Walt Whitman’s works. The Walt Whitman Archive began life as a CD-ROM. Now housed at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where Mr. Price teaches, the archive contains thousands of digital facsimiles of Whitman’s poetry and letters as well as writings about Whitman, and it’s constantly growing. It averages more than 20,000 visits a day from scholars, students, and Whitmaniacs everywhere. Money to keep the archive afloat comes from the co-directors’ home institutions and a series of grants, and an endowment is in the works.

The Chronicle asked Mr. Folsom to chat about how the archive has evolved and where it’s headed. This is the first in an occasional series of...