Twitter posts to be archived in Library of Congress

If you’ve ever posted a public Tweet, prepare for it to become a part of history.

Every public message since the birth of Twitter will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress, wrote Matt Raymond, director of communications for the Library of Congress, on the library’s official blog Wednesday.

Archiving all public Tweets fits into the library’s charge to maintain the public record.

“It tells you at any given time what people are interested in,” Raymond wrote. “It boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data.”

It should take a few months for the transfer and storage logistics to be worked out, Raymond wrote.

Many are worried about privacy issues associated with the archive, which will go back to March 2006.

“A lot of people are slightly terrified because they thought their Tweets would be ephemeral,” said Paul Jones, a UNC professor in the School of Information and Library Science.

Fred Stutzman, a graduate student in the School of Information and Library Science, said people might start sharing less.

“Even though the Tweets are public, it is a fallacy to assume that digital content shared in public was created with an understanding that the content would end up in a third-party, government-managed archive,” Stutzman wrote in his blog.

But some Twitter users argue that if people want their information to be private, they should set their privacy settings, which already exist.

Brice Russ, a graduate student in linguistics at Ohio State University and a 2008 UNC graduate, said he liked the archival idea. He based his senior thesis on Facebook posts.

“The Library of Congress has shown strong interest in the past in archiving ‘oral histories’ and other first-hand historical accounts, so given how relatively easy and inexpensive it is to store large amounts of data these days, I think this is a great and insightful way of continuing this process,” Russ wrote in an e-mail.

Some of the Tweets could become irrelevant in the future — many Tweets link to other Web sites that might not be around a few years from now, Jones said.

The content of the Tweet won’t make sense without the attached context, which will change or be deleted in time, he said.

“I think that future researchers will find this an extremely valuable resource for understanding how our society functioned and how people reacted to the events that happened in the first decade of the millennium,” Russ wrote.



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