Library of Congress limiting its Twitter collection | Droolin Dog dot Net

The Library of Congress will no longer keep a record of every single post to Twitter, opting instead to log a sampling of “thematic and event-based” posts beginning in 2018. “The Library will continue to acquire tweets but will do so on a very selective basis,” the Library of Congress said in an announcement released this month. “Generally, the tweets collected and archived will be thematic and event-based, including events such as elections, or themes of ongoing national interest, e.g. public policy.” The Library of Congress has maintained a record of every tweet sent by each Twitter user since 2010, plus posts that date all the way back to the platform’s founding in 2006. But “the nature of Twitter has changed over time,” the library said, pushing it to shift its collection practice from exhaustive to more selective. One issue, the library wrote in its announcement, is a shift in the content of the tweets themselves. They have grown longer, from a 140-character maximum to 280 characters, and they increasingly include other media, including images and videos. The library said its current process only collects the text from tweets, “limiting the value” of its system. The 12 years of tweets will be kept by the library, documenting “the rise of an important social media platform.” But a reduction of the posts being kept on record by the library will put its Twitter collection more in line with the library’s other standards. “The Library has determined that its initial Twitter collection will consist of a twelve-year snapshot of the beginning of one of social media’s most important and transformative communication tools,” the Library of Congress wrote in its announcement. “The Library generally does not collect comprehensively. Given the unknown direction of social media when the gift was first planned, the Library made an exception for public tweets.” Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/27/library-of-congress-twitter-archive-319362 Tags: #pch3lp, #TechNews, news, pch3lp, PCH3lp, TechNews

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