Library of Congress Is Atwitter
December 15, 2011
The Library of Congress triggers many trends. These range from mini conferences to poetry awards to spurring the House and Senate to create on site libraries.
Tweets as historical documents? Yep. Apparently that’s what they are these days.
Last year, the Library of Congress made an agreement with Twitter to archive every public tweet ever sent on the website. Only recently, however, has the announcement been discussed much by the public.
Infonary’s article, “Library of Congress to Store Tweets Based on Twitter Deal,” gives us more information on the thinking behind the deal. Bill Lefurgy, digital initiatives program manager at the library’s digital information infrastructure and preservation program, told Federal News Radio.com:
The archive contains ‘billions and billions of tweets’ and is ‘a unique record of our time,’ he said. ‘There have been studies involved with what are the moods of the public at various times of the day in reaction to certain kinds of news events,’ Lefurgy told the news organization. ‘There’s all these interesting kinds of mixing and matching that can be done using tweets as a big set of data.’
The tweets will be held by the library’s repository of historical documents and will only include tweets that were not marked protected or private.
I understand the potential importance of following Twitter trends on popular social topics or riveting news events, but to store every single tweet casted off into Twitterland seems ridiculous to me. The ramblings of emotionally supercharged teens and PR for Chas Bono will now not only be annoyingly posted on the social networking site, but will be available to scholars, researchers, and members of the House and Senate via the Library of Congress.
Andrea Hayden, December 15, 2011
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