Library of Congress Will Save Tweets
By STEVE LOHR
Published: April 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/technology/personaltech/15pogue.html?src=…
Not everyone would think that the actor Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter
musings on his daily doings constitute part of “the universal body of
human knowledge.”
But the Library of Congress, the 210-year-old guardian of knowledge
and cultural history, thinks so.
The library will archive the collected works of Twitter, the blogging
service, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 million
messages, all that contain 140 or fewer characters.
Library officials explained the agreement as another step in the
library’s embrace of digital media. Twitter, the Silicon Valley
start-up, declared it “very exciting that tweets are becoming part of
history.”
Academic researchers seem pleased as well. For hundreds of years, they
say, the historical record has tended to be somewhat elitist because
of its selectivity. In books, magazines and newspapers, they say, it
is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most
frequently.
But although celebrities like Mr. Kutcher may have the most followers
on Twitter, they make up a tiny portion of its millions of users.
“This is an entirely new addition to the historical record, the
second-by-second history of ordinary people,” said Fred R. Shapiro,
associate librarian and lecturer at the Yale Law School.
The library reached out to the company a few months ago about adding
Twitter’s content to the national archives, said Matt Raymond, the
library’s director of communications. He cited Twitter’s “immense
impact on culture and history,” like its use as a vital communications
tool by political dissidents in Iran and Barack Obama’s turning to
Twitter to declare victory in the 2008 election.
The Twitter archive will join the ambitious “Web capture” project at
the library, begun a decade ago. That effort has assembled Web pages,
online news articles and documents, typically concerning significant
events like presidential elections and the terrorist attacks of 9/11,
Mr. Raymond said.
The Web capture project already has stored 167 terabytes of digital
material, far more than the equivalent of the text of the 21 million
books in the library’s collection.
Some online commentators raised the question of whether the library’s
Twitter archive could threaten the privacy of users. Mr. Raymond said
that the archive would be available only for scholarly and research
purposes. Besides, he added, the vast majority of Twitter messages
that would be archived are publicly published on the Web.
“It’s not as if we’re after anything that’s not out there already,”
Mr. Raymond said. “People who sign up for Twitter agree to the terms
of service.”
Knowing that the Library of Congress will be preserving Twitter
messages for posterity could subtly alter the habits of some users,
said Paul Saffo, a visiting scholar at Stanford who specializes in
technology’s effect on society.
“After all,” Mr. Saffo said, “your indiscretions will be able to be
seen by generations and generations of graduate students.”
People thinking before they post on Twitter: now that would be historic indeed.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 15, 2010, on page
B2 of the New York edition.
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