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

Liz nwjerseyliz at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 14 17:02:57 PDT 2010


It's a massive amount of information to store. I was really surprised because I had a discussion with one of the first users of Twitter, a friend of the founders, who made a request to see some of his personal archive of Tweets which go back to March 2006. The staff tried to oblige him but eventually told him that these Tweets were not accessible. You can locate a specific Tweet if you have the exact URL but you can't browse years back through an archive, like looking at messages in email folders.

It makes me wonder if the Twitter staff can't organize all of the Tweets in storage (after all, the Search feature only goes back 6 days) in a way to make them accessible to users, how is the LOC going to organize and manage all of this data? I imagine that they are either going to concentrate on the accounts of notable people, news services, organizations, etc. or just have an undifferentiated mass of messages. Perhaps the arrangement will be that you can look at all Tweets from certain dates, say, you can pull messages from September 22, 2007.

Liz Pullen
nwjerseyliz at yahoo.com



More information about the Air-L mailing list