Remember two years ago when the Library of Congress announced that it was planning on archiving every tweet? Despite a story that ran on Canada.com last week that claimed the LoC has "quietly backed away from the commitment," our nation's foremost research library still plans to collect every tweet from the popular social network.
In 2010, when the plan was fist announced, Twitter cranked out 50 million tweets day. Now that number has risen to 400 million. With such a large volume of data, figuring a system to collect and organize it all is understandably very difficult.
“The process of how to serve it out to researchers is still being worked out, but we’re getting a lot of closer,” Jennifer Gavin told Nieman Journalism Lab. “I couldn’t give you a date specific of when we’ll be ready to make the announcement.”
When that system is in place and tweets begin to be archived, you won't be able to logon to a website to read them. You'll need to go to Washington D.C. with a valid library card. "My understanding is that at this time we do not intend to make it available by web,” said Gavin.
[via Nieman Journalism Lab]
