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

Nancy Baym nbaym at ku.edu
Wed Apr 14 18:55:53 PDT 2010


Camille ==

Thanks for your long thoughtful post. I don't mean to say Google 
Bad/Library of Congress Good, and I certainly don't mean to imply a 
lack of cultural value in Usenet posts (I'd have had no early career 
if I'd thought that!).

I do think that despite the many important similarities, the contexts 
are somewhat different in that Deja News moved what had been 
essentially a public (in the sense of not-owned by a company) 
distributed resource into an owned domain, and it made things that 
had not been archived archived. In the case of Twitter, the move is 
from corporate to public (US public anyway), and Twitter has always 
been at least somewhat archived or archivable.

Again, I don't think either move is unproblematic, but I do find the 
Twitter to LoC move less problematic than the USENET to Deja News to 
Google Groups move for those reasons.

Nancy



More information about the Air-L mailing list