[Air-L] Library of Congress Acquires Entire (Public) Twitter Archive

Nancy Baym nbaym at ku.edu
Wed Apr 14 16:35:36 PDT 2010


I am reminded of Google's acquisition of USENET archives and 
reposting of them as "google groups," indexed and searchable. It was 
a little shocking to find that posts you had assumed were going to a 
group at one time in a non-archived forum were now searchable, often 
times by your email address.

On the other hand, my gut reaction to the Library of Congress 
archiving public Twitter posts is positive. The public twitter stream 
is of historical cultural significance and is an amazing repository 
of mundane moments in the daily lives of many people and records of 
what they thought important. It was initially posted in an 
architecture that was searchable and that displayed all public tweets 
in an ongoing stream. I think it's great that the Twitter stream will 
be preserved and curated by an institution which is not going to go 
out of business, or get bought and reinvented, or just reinvent 
itself and make it all go away.

I recognize the privacy issues at stake, and think it's important to 
discuss them, but I'm fine with this.

Nancy,

>
>On Apr 14, 2010, at 6:13 PM, Michael Zimmer wrote:
>
>>  For those who haven't already seen the news, the Library of 
>>Congress announced today that they are acquiring the entire archive 
>>of public Twitter activity since March 2006:
>>
>>  Library of Congress Announcement:
>>   How Tweet It Is!: Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive
>>   http://www.loc.gov/tweet/how-tweet-it-is.html
>>
>>  Twitter Announcement:
>>   Tweet Preservation
>>   http://blog.twitter.com/2010/04/tweet-preservation.html
>>
>  > And my initial probe of various open concerns:
>>   Open Questions about Library of Congress Archiving Twitter Streams
>  > 
>http://michaelzimmer.org/2010/04/14/open-questions-about-library-of-congress-archiving-twitter-streams/




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