[liberationtech] Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress

[Gregory Foster]

Library of Congress Blog (Jan 4) - "Update on the Twitter Archive at the 
Library of Congress":
http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2013/01/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress/

Five-page whitepaper mentioned at end of pretty remarkable blog.

Library of Congress (Jan 2013) - "Update on the Twitter Archive At the 
Library of Congress":
http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2013/files/twitter_report_2013jan.pdf

> In April, 2010, the Library of Congress and Twitter signed an 
> agreement providing the
> Library the public tweets from the company’s inception through the 
> date of the
> agreement, an archive of tweets from 2006 through April, 2010. 
> Additionally, the Library
> and Twitter agreed that Twitter would provide all public tweets on an 
> ongoing basis
> under the same terms. The Library’s first objectives were to acquire 
> and preserve the
> 2006-10 archive; to establish a secure, sustainable process for 
> receiving and preserving a
> daily, ongoing stream of tweets through the present day; and to create 
> a structure for
> organizing the entire archive by date. This month, all those 
> objectives will be completed.
> To date, the Library has an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets.
>
> The Library’s focus now is on confronting and working around the 
> technology challenges
> to making the archive accessible to researchers and policymakers in a 
> comprehensive,
> useful way. It is clear that technology to allow for scholarship 
> access to large data sets is
> lagging behind technology for creating and distributing such data. 
> Even the private sector
> has not yet implemented cost-effective commercial solutions because of 
> the complexity
> and resource requirements of such a task. The Library is now pursuing 
> partnerships with
> the private sector to allow some limited access capability in our 
> reading rooms. These
> efforts are ongoing and a priority for the Library.
>
> This document summarizes the Library’s work to date and outlines 
> present-day progress
> and challenges.


gf

-- 
Gregory Foster || gfoster at entersection.org
@gregoryfoster <> http://entersection.com/