Library of Congress acquires Twitter archive

    Matt Raymond, director of communications at the Library of Congress, said the library is acquiring a Twitter archive. Let me remind you that this Washington library is the largest library in the world.

    Library of Congress


    All public tweets created since March 2006 will be digitally stored in the Library of Congress. This is a fairly large amount of information, given that more than 55 million tweets are created on Twitter daily, and their total number is already billions. A very small percentage of them are protected by privacy settings, while most are publicly available.

    For four years, Twitter has become part of important global events around the world, from historic elections to devastating natural disasters. Matt Raymond provided some examples of tweets of interest. This is the first tweet Jack Dorsey, tweet Obama's victory in the presidential election, tweets ( 1 , 2) a photojournalist arrested in Egypt and freed thanks to Twitter.

    The Library of Congress wants to dispel the stereotype that only books can be in the library. Library of Congress staff have been analyzing Internet materials since 2000. To date, the library stores more than 167 terabytes of information, the source of which is the web.

    Co-founder of Twitter Biz Stone notes that tweets will be available to the library for external use only six months after their publication, only for non-commercial research, public display in the library itself and for preservation.

    Biz Stone also said that Google has created a tool for reading tweets related to certain events. The service is called Google Replay.

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