Just think: Thomas Jefferson sold 6487 books to the Library of Congress, his entire personal library, in 1815. A Hefty and impressive collection in his time. Today, Twitter logs approximately 50 Million Tweets a Day. Is all of it as vital and informative as what can be found in the Jefferson Collection? Maybe.

The Library on Congress will now be keeping your tweets for eternity. From the Quoted Politician, to the lay man who re-tweets him with a #fail. Tweets will be cataloged and preserved for reference and anything else you want to do with 140 characters of pure gold.

(Or crap, lets be honest)

Here’s the official (sorta stuff)

They Announced it on their twitter feed!

Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive — ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow.

(Click to head to their Twitter Page)

From the Library of Congresses Blog:

“Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress. That’s right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.”

We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations. In other words, if you’re looking for a place where important historical and other information in digital form should be preserved for the long haul, we’re it!

It’s an unusual move, but not unprecedented. The Library of Congress has been collecting digital content since the 2000 presidential campaign, operates Web pages for Congressional members and currently holds “more than 167 terabytes of web-based information.”

writes Dylan Stableford of Media Alley

Here is the word from The Twitter Blog:

The Library of Congress is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States and it is the largest library in the world. The Library’s primary mission is research and it receives copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered in the United States. Recently, the Library of Congress signaled to us that the public tweets we have all been creating over the years are important and worthy of preservation.

It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It’s very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets will be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.

ON the one hand, this unnerves me a little. On the other hand I’m glad an institution I respect is taking this job on. Much better then some money grubbing “interested party” ….. Thoughts?

Thanks to Phil for bringing this to my attention.

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