LOC-Twitter

HOW TWEET IT IS: The Library of Congress revealed yesterday that it plans to archive every public tweet since the launch of Twitter in 2006—cleverly doing so in a tweet to its 50k followers. “This is an entirely new addition to the historical record, the second-by-second history of ordinary people,” Yale Associate Librarian Fred Shapiro told the N.Y. Times. Wrote LOC Director of Communications Matt Raymond in a blog post: ""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. And I'm certain we'll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive." The Twitter archive will join the LOC’s massive Web Capture project, begun in 2000, which has stored 167 terabytes of digital material, dwarfing the size of its 21 million-book collection. (4/15a)