Library of Congress to receive entire Twitter archive

[Geee]

Federalnewsradio:

Tweets, emails and other electronic communications can be considered "government documents" and must be preserved. The National Archives handles official government materials, while the Library of Congress' mandate is to deal with anything that may have long-term historical interest.

"We're basically in the same situation as the National Archives, only on a much larger scale," said Bill Lefurgy, digital initiatives program manager at the Library of Congress national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. "We tend to have a much larger perspective in terms of what we collect." He joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin and Amy Morris Tuesday morning to talk about the library's digital mission.

But how much digital information are we talking about? How about all of the tweets from Twitter's archives?

"We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public," Lefurgy said. The archives don't contain tweets that users have protected, but everything else — billions and billions of tweets — are there."

Using new technical processes it has developed, Twitter is moving a large quantity of electronic data from one electronic source to another. "They've had to do some pretty nifty experimentation and invention to develop the tools and a process to be able to move all of that data over to us," Lefurgy said.

The Library of Congress has long been the repository of important, historical documents and the Twitter library, as a whole, is something historic in itself.

"We were excited to be involved with acquiring the Twitter archives because it's a unique record of our time," Lefurgy said. "It's also a unique way of communication. It's not so much that people are going to be interested in what you or I had for lunch, which some people like to say on Twitter."

Researchers would be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information.

[Pepper]

Tweets, emails and other electronic communications can be considered "government documents" and must be preserved.

 

Geee!

 

I am still waiting on the day when Obama's original birth certificate is found and file at National Archives. Only then would I be even slightly concerned about the tweets from the twits.

[clearvision]

Just because something is on the web does not mean the Government needs to spend money and time to archive it.

[Chickadee]

Just because something is on the web does not mean the Government needs to spend money and time to archive it.

And you think you have problems with managing server content. GADS! What a nightmare to have to find the server space for every TWIT and TWEET. But of course, with the unlimited resources available from We The People, no problem on affording those servers.

[RandyM]

I am still waiting on the day when Obama's original birth certificate is found and file at National Archives. Only then would I be even slightly concerned about the tweets from the twits.

 

 

I didn't know the US Nat'l Archives maintained official documents from Kenya, too!

[Pepper]

Yes, it's true, RandyM

 

Although I am only looking for one in particular, so it shouldn't take too much storage space at Nat Archives.