Lots of attention to the announcement that Library of Congress will archive Twitter posts - for researchers, not the general public.
Resource of the Week: The Twitter Archives from the Library of Congress & Google: The Facts As We Know Them, Gary Price, ResourceShelf (Apr 19)
Gary Price has pieced together from announcements that LC is the preservationist. Google may be the public search engine through its new Google Replay. For now that goes back to February 2010, but Google has said it will index the entire Twitter archive (going back to 2006.)
Searching Every Public Tweet Ever Twittered by Avi Rappoport, Information Today (Apr 22)
There is value to preserving this archive.
"Primary sources like Twitter are exactly what should be available for researchers. It's amazing what good historians can do with tattered bits of seemingly-unimportant information, such as medieval laundry lists. Records of who attended what parties may explain political alliances, which lead to important decisions; wills show the evolution of legal theories; deadly dull sermons may include the first use of a certain word. Historians are grateful for any and all these sources, because they are contemporary and unmediated-there is no opportunity for intermediate bias or misunderstanding. That doesn't mean that there is not a bias in what has been saved, or that historians are completely un-biased, but new eyes always see new things."
Posted by Gwen at April 22, 2010 05:52 PM