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Conservation Of Tweets
Twitter has made all of our dreams come true this week as our billions of 140 characters or less messages will now be professionally curated by the Library of Congress.
It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets will be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.
Of course, this changes everything. I don't think I can tweet in the same carefree manner now that I know that my tweets will take their place next to all of the great text works of our Republic.
I've been fascinated with the idea of preserving our electronic media heritage ever since reading about the basic idea in Frank Herbert's Dune series:
Taraza rather distrusted Archivists, which she knew was an ambivalent attitude because she recognized the underlying necessity for data. But Chapter House Records could only be viewed as a jungle of of abbreviations, special notations, coded insertions, and footnotes. Such material often required a Mentat for translation or, what was worse in times of extreme fatigue demanded that she delve into Other Memories. ...You could never consult Archival Records in a straightforward manner.
From the Twitter blog.
Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created. Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply. A tiny percentage of accounts are protected but most of these tweets are created with the intent that they will be publicly available. Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world—from historic elections to devastating disasters.
(Library of Congress Tweet Archive)
The holoprojector flickered with its continuing production above the table top - more bits and pieces that she had summoned.
(Read more about Herbert's Bene Gesserit House records)
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