The Library of Congress is getting burned out on the massive volume of public tweets it has been archiving, and starting in the new year next week, will become more selective.
According to a white paper published this week (and reported on by Recode), the Library of Congress and Twitter signed an agreement in 2010 that allowed for the Library to collect tweets back to when the social media platform launched in 2006.
Twelve years and millions of daily musings later, the Library is changing its strategy to focus on thematic and event-based tweets, primarily from events such as elections or themes of ongoing national interest.
The original intent was to document “the rise of an important social media platform” and the Library feels as if this has been accomplished. And now, with the volume of tweets increasing dramatically — not to mention the size of them via character count — in the last several years, future generations will gain access to a more edited collection from 2018 onward.
