The Daily Feed

Library of Congress to Archive Public Tweets


Twestival 3/25/10 by @heylovedc

I have to admit, I don’t tweet.  In fact it makes me slightly uncomfortable to say “tweet” unless I’m doing an impression of a baby bird.  While I do have a Twitter account, I only use it to follow Andy Roddick and other tennis related people and only when I’m covering a match that they’re playing in.  But I really don’t care where you are now, or now, or even now.  I don’t care what you’re thinking about now, now, or twenty seconds from now.  I don’t care what you had for breakfast or what you’re eating for lunch, right now.  But you know who does?  The Library of Congress.

That’s right, the LOC will be acquiring all public tweets since Twitter was founded in March of 2006.  However even though I’m in the technology business, I don’t quite  understand what this means.  Is someone going to ship them terabytes of data on a hard drive?  Are they going to continue to archive tweets going forward into the future?  How will the public be able to access this data?  I’m sure they have it all figured out, and I really think it’s great that the LOC is keeping up with the times instead of being a collection of old, dusty books.  You can find them online on Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr to name a few sites.  Or you can find them at 101 Independence Ave SE, now, now, and now.