Michael Zimmer.org » Blog Archive » More Details on Twitter-Libr. When it was announced that the The Library of Congress was acquiring the entire archive of public Twitter activity since March 2006, I posted a set of open questions regarding the potential privacy implications of this very unique arrangement. I then proceeded to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the LOC requesting a copy of the agreement, any internal policies or documents governing how the Twitter data will be archived and used, and requested answers to these questions. It has now been almost 2 weeks and I have had not yet received a response from the Library.
However, interviews with Library personnel posted at The American Prospect and Ars Technica provide us some insight into the nature of the agreement and the plans for the data. Piecing all these together, we can discern the following: Archive Contents There has been little information available about what, precisely, will be included in the dataset provided to the LOC. Personal/Profile Information Geo-Locational Data. How Tweet It Is!: Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive « Libr. (UPDATE: Here’s a January 2013 status report on our work with the Twitter archives.) (UPDATE: We posted an FAQ on April 28.) 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 thought it fitting to give the initial heads-up to the Twitter community itself via our own feed @librarycongress. We will also be putting out a press release later with even more details and quotes. Twitter plans to make its own announcement today on its blog from “Chirp,” the Official Twitter Developer Conference, in San Francisco. (Thanks to my co-blogger, Jennifer, for the headline. Michael Zimmer.org » Blog Archive » Open Questions about Library. (See update below referencing Twitter’s announcement; this post about how your private tweets might end up in the archive; and this post where more details about the agreement have been provided) The Library of Congress tweeted today that they are acquiring the entire archive of public Twitter activity since March 2006.
(The official blog post is down, but a copy is on the LOC’s Facebook page.) 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. . … We will also be putting out a press release later with even more details and quotes. This is big. And while the LOC stresses that they’re doing this for historical and scholarly reasons, there are major implications regarding the privacy and contextual expectations of Twitter users. Here are some immediate questions that need to be addressed: Will user profile information also be archived and made accessible?
The Library of Congress Is Now Following You on Twitter | The Am. Update: Links have been added to some of the library's programs and partners. On Wednesday, the Library of Congress announced it had signed an agreement with the microblogging service Twitter to archive all public tweets sent since the service began in 2006. I spoke with Martha Anderson, the director of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress, about the project and how it fits into the library's digital-archiving efforts.
She warned me when we got started that her department had a cumbersome name. That's a very impressive-sounding title. Well, the name is horrible. It's shortened to NDIIPP. [Laughs.] What's the best? So who came to you with the request, or the idea about Twitter? So they began to look around for a strategy for conserving that content in the long term.
We do a collection for every Supreme Court nominee -- Web sites and blogs and all sorts of things. Is there anything analogous in Library of Congress history? Why the Library of Congress cares about archiving our tweets. "Happiness is knowing yourself, loving yourself, and being yourself, F**** anyone who doesn't get you""Surprising. Obama did not claim Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh as dependents even though their income totally dependent on him. ""If queue numbers in the Store are correct, Blizzard is making over half a million dollars an hour on the Celestial Steed. " The US government is paying good money to archive tweets such as the above for posterity, but why? Those "top tweets" from the past week will join billions of others—every tweet since Twitter launched in 2006, in fact—in a new archive at the 210-year-old Library of Congress.
There, they will reside in air-conditioned comfort on servers that also hold the Library's current 167TB archive of Web data. This was big news—so big that when the Library of Congress blogged about it last week, traffic to the site brought down the entire loc.gov server. Oh, I'm going to be in the Library of Congress because I tweet! Anderson herself takes the pragmatic view. Library of Congress (librarycongress) Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress. The U.S. Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. In addition to a massive printed collection, the Library already has an extensive collection of other digital assets. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world. The Library does extensive work with data format standards, the semantic Web and other platforms for outside analysis.
The addition of Twitter into the organization's offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research. From a new kind of historical record to an unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction, this is big. When the Library of Congress was founded in the year 1800, publishing was very expensive and relatively few people did it. For now there are more questions than answers with regards to this Library of Congress Twitter news. Nate Anderson at ArsTechnica offers this context: Library of Congress Archives Twitter History, While Google Searc. While the short form musings of a generation chronicled by Twitter might seem ephemeral, the Library of Congress wants to save them for posterity — and Google wants to let you search them like an archive, the organizations announced Wednesday.
The unrelated announcements make it clear that at least some people think billions of short messages are worth archiving. In four years, the service turned simple, 140-character status updates on what people are doing into a global publishing phenomenon that tracks and creates the Zeitgeist. Now, Twitter messages — from the musings of celebrities to citizens’ cataloging of their daily breakfasts to the pronouncements of politicians — will be archived permanently by the Library of Congress. The Twitter archive of all public tweets, starting from its inception in March 2006, will join such august collections such as letters from the Civil War and famous photographs from Great Depression-era works project. The point? See Also: Twitter archive to be stored by Library of Congress. Library of Congress to archive Twitter - Media, News - The Indep. The plan to preserve every tweet since Twitter's inception in March 2006, as part of the national archive means that the 50 million daily tweets will be stored digitally in the historical repository, adding up to billions.Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the company blog, "It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history.
Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world - from historic elections to devastating disasters. " Everything from urgent news from Haiti's earthquake to fans of Justin Bieber have been donated to the world's largest archive. Officially the research library of the US Congress in Washington DC, the Library of Congress holds more than 21 million books with a total of close to 142 million items, including maps and music.
The Library of Congress Facebook page posted in a casual tone: Have you ever sent out a "tweet" on the popular Twitter social media service? Library of Congress to Preserve Tweets for Eternity. Today the Library of Congress is announcing that it's doing its part to digitally preserve each and every public tweet since the beginning of time ... err Twitter. It fittingly broke the news on Twitter earlier today. As a federal cultural institution, the Library of Congress exists for research purposes, preserving every form of written word imaginable — and now that includes our tweets. The institution deems tweets important and hopes to use the archives "to learn about ourselves and the world around us. " Twitter further explains the news in its own announcement. Biz Stone writes that after a six-month delay, "Tweets will be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation. " The news is quite significant and reinforces the importance of the information we share in 140 characters or less.
[img credit: Rainer Ebert] Library of Congress, Google to Archive Twitter - PCWorld. Twitter's search function is great for finding out what is happening at this very moment. It's so great that and Bing have added the results to their search results and, in the process, given Twitter its first revenue source (more $ are coming). Today, Google announced that it would be searching across the whole Twitter archive.
Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period. It will probably start later today because, as of this writing the service isn't available.
Here's a screenshot from Google: Library Of Congress Twitter Archive: All Tweets Since 2006 To Be. The US Library of Congress announced a major new acquisition: it will be obtaining all public tweets dating back to March 2006. Appropriately, the library spilled the news on Twitter via the official Library of Congress account (@LibraryCongress). The tweet read, "Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive -- ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow. " The Library of Congress directed users to its blog, which explained, "important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, President Obama's tweet about winning the 2008 election, and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter.
" "Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition," wrote Library of Congress blogger Matt Raymond. The Library of Congress has already started a collection of digital data. Twitter and the Library of Congress « Fred Stutzman. Library of Congress plan for Twitter: a big, permanent retweet. The Library of Congress' project to archive Twitter was a nod to the significance of the social networking site that gave voice to imprisoned journalists in Egypt and fueled a rallying cry for users to donate money for relief efforts in Haiti.
It also will memorialize a mountain of information on the mundane, from burned breakfast bagels to delays on Metro's Red Line. Internet scholars say those everyday recordings are useful to researchers, who will comb through the 50 million messages -- known as tweets -- spouted each day to provide a snapshot of our culture, in real time. "We've been seeing in the past decades the rise of new scholarly disciplines that look at social history . . . that pay attention to everyday people and their everyday lives," said Lee Rainey, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project.
"This information provides detailed evidence about how technology-based social networks form and evolve over time," said Librarian of Congress James H. Library of Congress: We're archiving every tweet ever made. Get ready for fame, tweeters of the world: the Library of Congress is archiving for posterity every public tweet made since the service went live back in 2006. Every. Single. Tweet. The LOC announced the news, appropriately enough, on Twitter. Matt Raymond, one the Library's official bloggers, notes that "important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election, and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter.
" But even those billions of other tweets and retweets, the ones about how you just got back from the worlds' most epic jog or how you're sick at home with the crocodile flu or how your crappy Internet connection just went down again and you can't take it any more—those matter too. Digital technologies pose a problem for the Library and other archival institutions, though.