Tech & Biz

Library of Congress to Archive Entire Twitter Catalog

by Jordan Yerman | April 14, 2010 at 10:35 am

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Entire Twitter History to Enter Library of Congress

The US Library of Congress will archive every public tweet since 2006: Twitter's entire public-facing catalog. The Library of Congress Twitter archive will not include direct messages. What percentage of this catalog will consist of "testing" or "good night tweeps"? What percentage will consist of retweets without commentary? What percentage will consist of John Mayer saying something weird?

More newsworthy tweets will be highlighted, as well as tweets which pushed use cases of Twitter into new territory.

Library of Congress Encounters Fail Whale

The Library of Congress has details on the project, but curiosity from the rest of the web has introduced the Library to a common Twitter phenomenon: the Fail Whale. Indeed, loc.gov was not ready for this much traffic (or much traffic at all). Library of Congress also made the announcement on its Facebook page, which you can see below.

Perhaps any tweet that includes the keywords "justin bieber" should be relegated to a secondary server, so as not to clog up the overall stream of tweets.

Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive -- ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow.

Twitter plans to make its own announcement today on its blog from "Chirp," the Official Twitter Developer Conference, in San Francisco.

So if you think the Library of Congress is "just books," think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000.