US Library of Congress plans archive of Twitter

Thursday, April 15, 2010

The US Library of Congress plans to create an archive of every "tweet," or post made on Twitter. It announced the move via Twitter.

Twitter's general counsel Alex MacGillivray told the BBC: "I think it shows the tweets are an interesting part of the historical record. This project however is not about us, it is about our users and the fact they use the service to chronicle these amazing events. President Obama actually tweeted after he was elected. That is a big deal and it's something he did. It is not something we imagined when we were forming the service."

The library plans to highlight the historically significant tweets such as Barack Obama's tweet when he won the 2008 presidential election.

	I think it shows the tweets are an interesting part of the historical record.
—Alex MacGillivray, Twitter's general counsel

Although the library plans a Twitter archive, it does not indicate a change of the Library of Congress' focus. The library reportedly has 160 terabytes (163,840 gigabytes) of data already taken from other Internet sources.

There are around 50 million tweets sent per day, all less than 140 characters; the total number of tweets has gone into the billions.

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Sources

Hope, Dan. "Library of Congress to house Twitter archive" — MSNBC, April 14, 2010
Shiels, Maggie. "Congress to archive every tweet ever posted publicly" — BBC News Online, April 14, 2010
"Web Archiving FAQs" — Library of Congress, April 14, 2010

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Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.