Library of Congress to Archive All Tweets

Posted on April 15, 2010

The Library of Congress (LOC) will be archiving all of your tweets. The Library of Congress has acquired Twitter's archives and every public tweet since Twitter's inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. The LOC will also archive all future tweets. There will be a six month delay before tweets enter the archive.

In a blog post on the LOC blog, the LOC is described to be much more than books.

So if you think the Library of Congress is 'just books,' think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.

The LOC also operates the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.

Twitter is primarily a tool for what is happening right now but there are some tweets that could have historical relevance. An archive will also be useful because you can not go back very far right now with Twitter's current search engine. It is unclear what will happen to tweets that are deleted after they have been archived, but it seems likely that once a tweet enters the LOC archive it is there for good.