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Twitter & The Library of Congress

Thursday, April 22, 2010 9:11 am

The Library of Congress, the venerable repository of our nation’s collective knowledge, the research library for both houses of Congress and the home of the Copyright Office has decided to collect and archive every Tweet ever tweeted. So, be careful what you tweet because it will be stored, and presumably searchable, for as long as there is a United States of America. Kind of scary.

The mission of the Library of Congress (LOC) is to do research for Senators and Congressional members and to register Copyrights through its Copyright Office. Although the library is available to the public, borrowing is restricted to legislators, Supreme Court Justices and other high-ranking government officials. Unfortunately, much of the original collection was burned during the War of 1812; nevertheless, the LOC persevered to now boast a collection including every copyrighted book, map, printed material and musical score registered in the United States. To this illustrious group, 55 million Tweets per day will be collected every day and made part of American history.

So what is a Tweet? It’s an electronic message of 140 characters or less sent through the social networking service known as Twitter. It is similar to a cell phone text message, except a Twitter text message can be simultaneously sent to thousands of people. Most messages are mundane messages about every day life. Regardless, the LOC has determined that our social Tweets are just as important as the Twitter messages from the 2009 Iran dissidents letting the world know in real time what was really happening. One of the most famous Tweets of all time was sent by Barrack Obama declaring victory in the 2008 election.

How serious is the LOC in their Twitter collection process? So far, 167 terabytes of digital material representing every Tweet sent since Twitter’s inception in 2006 has been captured and stored for posterity. To put this into perspective, from 2006 through March of 2010, the captured Tweets far exceed the digital equivalent of all 21 million books presently housed in the LOC’s collection. As for now, the LOC promises to restrict the collected Tweets only for scholarly research.

There are some questions in our brave new social networking world. Are Tweets Copyright protected? No. Who owns our Tweets? No one and everyone – all Tweets are in the public domain, housed in The Library of Congress and available to our descendants. OMG!

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