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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