Library of Congress to No Longer Archive All Public Tweets
The Library of Congress is giving up on the idea of preserving every thought people are putting out on public Twitter. Starting Jan. 1, 2018, the library will now be more selective in the tweets that they want to preserve for posterity.
In 2010, the Library of Congress started an ambitious project aimed at preserving all public tweets "for the same reason it collects other materials—to acquire and preserve a record of knowledge and creativity for Congress and the American people," the Library announced back then, as quoted by Tech Crunch.
It has been a complete record until this decision, with Twitter agreeing to turn over all the other tweets posted before 2010, all the way back to when the platform was just starting out in 2006.
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The Library's goal was made much harder by the new character limit, which now doubles the possible size of tweets from 140 characters to 280. It's a change that greatly influenced the Library's decision, as it outlined in a whitepaper earlier this month.
In this paper, the Library listed the reasons for the change, which also includes the way tweets have grown not just in size, but in volume over the past years. With Twitter now heavily into multimedia, the information the Library is interested in has become more limited, as well.
"The Library only receives text. It does not receive images, videos or linked content. Tweets now are often more visual than textual, limiting the value of text-only collecting," the Library explained in its whitepaper.
So far, this archive of tweets has not been made open to the public. Various challenges have made it difficult for the Library of Congress to launch a public archive, chief among them the explosive growth of tweets, as The Atlantic points out.
In 2010, people were putting out 55 million a day. Just two years later, this figure has climbed to 500 million daily in 2012. On average, 6,000 new tweets are being launched every second according to Internet Live Stats.
