Non-functional requirements (quality attributes) for social media archiving tools (general)

1.

Usability
While one should ideally not let the difficulty of using a tool necessarily become an obstacle, it is understandable that a less usable tool might result in slower or decreased adoption and desired outputs. It is thus more beneficial, if and when possible, to select tools which can be used efficiently with less effort in order to make the best of the often-restricted time, human, and financial resources that cultural heritage organizations involved with digital preservation have.

Usability requirements in social media capturing software can refer to simplicity in the GUI or even the presence of a GUI, the responsiveness of the software e.g., how quickly it loads and completes tasks, and the extent to which users with average IT proficiency can (semi)-intuitively learn to use the software without considerable learning curves. It might also refer to the presence and quality of the tool’s documentation.

2.

Scalability
When doing social media archiving it is especially important to be able to configure a workflow and its tools in order to deal with possibly fluctuating amounts of data to be captured, often on short notice (e.g., on the occasion of important socio-political events). Optimal use of institutional resources might mean strategically increasing or decreasing the time spent, machines devoted, or storage space assigned for a particular workflow.
Scalable social media archiving software is able to withstand capturing large amounts of data without failure, and to be integrated with other existing systems.

3.

Reliability
Reliability is a relevant attribute in social media archiving software as it indicates that the tool can be trusted to become part of established workflows in an organization. Reliability in a social media archiving tool could translate to the tool being consistent in how much time it needs to capture similar kinds of data under similar conditions (machines, bandwidth, configurations). Additionally, and in a broader sense, reliability could also refer to how well-supported the tool is in terms of continued development and maintenance.

4.

Security
Security is a relevant requirement because of the sensitive nature of social media data. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is at the core of this material and calls for attention to privacy, during capturing and when publishing. Privacy and copyright issues could arise if an organization unwittingly shares captured social media content without the platform's and/or users’ consent. Additionally, the security of the organization itself could be at risk.

Secure social media archiving tools could enable the protection of those using them to perform captures (e.g., by not storing the archivist’s usernames and passwords in the output files when harvesting password-protected pages), and also the protection of users through filtering and scoping to weed out sensitive information from a capture. If the tool is open-source, its code could also be examined for vulnerabilities and improvement.