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24 December 2025 to 1 January 2026

24 December 2025 to 1 January 2026: The German National Library will be closed at both locations. The exhibitions of the German Exile Archive 1933–1945 will also be closed. The exhibitions of the German Museum of Books and Writing will open from 10:00 to 18:00 on 27, 28 and 30 December.

Social Media Access Days

Hall full of people sitting at tables and facing the stage. One person stands on the stage and speaks to the audience. Photo: Stephan Jockel

Social Media Access Days

Social media data between research and infrastructure – sustainable archiving, indexing and access

17.3.-19.3.2026

German National Library (Frankfurt am Main)

Keynote

We are delighted to announce our keynote speaker: Prof Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane).
https://www.qut.edu.au/about/our-people/academic-profiles/a.bruns

Nearly a Decade after the APIcalypse: Where Are We Now on Social Media Data Access?

2018’s Cambridge Analytica scandal served as a convenient excuse for many social media platforms to severely curtail access to their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), restricting the critical, independent, public-interest scrutiny of public communication on social media, and of the platforms’ management and moderation of such communication, at a time of increasing polarisation, disinformation, toxicity, and general dysfunction in public debate. At the time, four broad pathways appeared available to researchers seeking to address this ‘APIcalypse’: to walk away, to lobby for change, to accommodate and acquiesce, and to break the rules; all four paths have been explored in the contexts of different platforms, but the severe disruption to established research approaches has also led many of us to critically evaluate how and why we have used the social media activity data that APIs (used to) provide. Reviewing developments across a range of leading and emerging platforms, this keynote explores the current situation in our field, and discusses possible future developments.

Conference topics

Online platforms, especially social media platforms, are both research objects and sources of data for a variety of research approaches in the humanities and social sciences, computer science, and the natural and life sciences. The historical evolution of social media makes them a part of our digital cultural heritage. However, the processes used by institutions to archive and document social media data are still only rudimentary, not least because of their economic, social and aesthetic characteristics and the unique attributes of media technology. Researchers, research institutions and cultural heritage institutions therefore face a wide range of problems in terms of their archiving, indexing and use. Researchers who wish to work with social media data also encounter numerous new challenges, especially when fundamental changes such as the elimination of application programming interfaces (APIs) impact access to specific data from online platforms.

The archiving, indexing and use of dynamic data from social media are therefore fraught with problems which researchers, research institutions, libraries and archives have to tackle in a consistent manner. Ideally, solutions to these problems should be developed cooperatively, since this requires extensive effort which would be beyond the scope of a single data community or discipline.

The aim of the conference is therefore to enable libraries, archives, infrastructural facilities, research institutions and researchers to network and exchange experiences with archiving and the sustainable use of data and digital objects from social media. We explicitly welcome case studies and presentations on solutions and their practical implementation as well as reports on research findings.

We are particularly interested in contributions on the following key topics:

  • Sustainable infrastructure for collecting and providing access to social media content
  • Interaction between researchers and archiving institutions
  • Ethical issues and best practices
  • Legal issues and solutions
  • Challenges posed by restrictive data access from social media platforms
  • Experiences with data access in the context of the Digital Services Act
  • Status and preservation of social media from an archival and cultural-historical perspective, e.g. posts, interactions, platform elements
  • Consolidation of collections, corpora, holdings
  • Metadata, data documentation and indexing social media data
  • Use of AI & LLMs for data documentation and indexing purposes
  • Initiatives focusing on archiving and access
  • Concepts for the provision and use of derivatives (aggregated or derivative formats) from social media
  • Experiences with the reusability of available data

Programme Social Media Access Days

More

Participation

The conference will take place from March 17, 2026, 1:30 p.m. to March 19, 2026, 1:15 p.m. as a face-to-face event at the German National Library in Frankfurt am Main. The talks will be streamed. A pre-conference Workshop „The GESIS Methods Hub Social Media Datasprint“ will be held on march 17, 2026, from 9 – 13 hours.

Registration is required. A conference fee of 5o euros will be charged for on-site participation (reduced rate for students 25 euros) and 5 euros for participation via live stream, plus ticket charge.  The link to the live stream will be sent to you the day before the conference.

The number of participants is limited. You will receive your confirmation by e-mail after transferring the conference fee.

A refund of the conference fees paid is only possible if the event is cancelled by February 20, 2026.

If the event is cancelled after 20 February 2026 or has to be postponed by DNB at short notice, which is unavoidable due to circumstances beyond DNB's control (force majeure or comparable circumstances such as national strikes by transport companies), no refund of the conference fees is possible. A refund due to non-participation or prevention of participation is excluded, regardless of the reason.

The event is open to the public and will be photographed in parts. If you do not wish to be photographed, you can let us know on site.

Personal data will be processed exclusively for the purpose of planning and holding the event and then deleted. The data will not be passed on to third parties.

Please also refer to the privacy policy on the website eventbrite.de.

You can find the conference program here:  Social Media Access Days program

Registration: Tickets available on Eventbrite

Accessibility: The venue where the event is taking place is wheelchair accessible.

Contact: twarchiv@dnb.de

Organisation

German National Library Frankfurt am Main

Dr Britta Woldering

twarchiv@dnb.de 

Program Committee

Stefan Dietze (GESIS and HHU Düsseldorf)
Dimitar Dimitrov (GESIS)
Philippe Genêt (German National Library)
Tatjana Scheffler (Ruhr University Bochum)
Katrin Weller (GESIS and HHU Düsseldorf)
Britta Woldering (German National Library)

Cooperation partners

BERD@NFDI
German National Library
GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
NFDI4DataScience
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Last changes: 17.12.2025
Short-URL: https://www.dnb.de/EN/smad

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