...Not exactly.
Library of Congress has just announced that they will be archiving collected works from Twitter. Library officials stated that this is another step for the Congress to embrace social media; Twitter has declared that it is "very exciting that tweets are becoming a part of history."
Fred R. Shapiro, associate librarian and lecturer a the Yale Law School said, "This is an entirely new addition to the historical record, the second-by-second history of ordinary people." The library had previously contacted the company a few months ago in hopes of adding Twitter's content to the national archives according to Matt Raymond, the library's director of communications.
Twitter will join the "Web capture" project which began about a year ago. This project has gathered Web pages, online news articles and documents that pertain to significant events such as the presidential elections and terrorist attacks of 9/11. It has also stored 167 terabytes of digital materials which outweighs the library's collection of 21 million books.
Many have raised the concern of this possibly invading the privacy of Twitter users. Raymond assured that anything archived would not be private, "It's not as if we're after anything that's not out there already," he said.
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4 comments:
Craziness!
This will be interesting in how years from now people will use this to reference certain events in history. Maybe history textbooks one day will reference tweets?
I think this is so exciting. Teaching history through tweets..I can see it already!
This is great! A lot of our history is being written in 140 characters or less and they need to be documented! but seriously it is great that our government is recognizing social media as an actual news outlet
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