US Library of Congress backtracks

For the last several years, the Library of Congress has archived almost every tweet ever made. Starting with the new year, the Library of Congress will be more selective about the tweets it archives. In 2010, when Twitter was not as omnipresent as it is now, the Library of Congress and Twitter agreed to create an archive of all publicly available tweets to capture "the emergence of online social media". People are tweeting more now than they have before, the tweets themselves have gotten longer, and the cataloging process leaves out images, videos, and linked content - all of which are essential to many posts. In 2010, the institution reached an "exciting and groundbreaking" agreement with Twitter to acquire the text of every public tweet posted from 2006 through April 2010 in a "bold and celebrated" initiative that was praised by researchers. "As the twelfth year of Twitter draws to a close, the Library has made a decision to change its collection strategy for receipt of tweets on December 31, 2017", the institution announced Tuesday. The Library's existing record of Twitter's first 12 years isn't going anywhere, but - as an included white paper points out - it isn't the institution's usual practice to gather data comprehensively. In a white paper released on Tuesday, the Library of Congress indicated that the growing volume of tweets had become too overwhelming to store. "With social media now established, the Library is bringing its collecting practice more in line with its collection policies", it said in the document. First and foremost from a collection perspective: the sheer number of tweets. The archive "will remain embargoed until access issues can be resolved in a cost-effective and sustainable manner", Osterberg said. The library, which is believed to be the largest in the world with a mission of preserving important national and global cultural records, announced this week it would stop collecting the entire Twittersphere's tweets from January 2018. "The Library continuously reviews its ongoing acquisitions, whether subscriptions to newspapers or the receipt of tweets via a gift. Future generations will learn much about this rich period in our history, the information flows, and social and political forces that help define the current generation".