Preserving primary sources in the electronic age

I was intrigued to read this morning that the Library of Congress has announced that it will archive all Twitter messages (“tweets”) sent since the service since Twitter went on line in March 2006.

Read the LOC’s announcement to see an LOC blog statement on the potential of holding this archive of 140-or-fewer-character messages, including Barack Obama’s tweet sent as he won the Presidency in 2008.

For historians who have been rightly concerned about what will become of primary sources as paper records give way to electronic online files, this is an interesting and hopeful move. The LOC has long been in the forefront of the digitizing revolution (American Memory, for example). Digitizing, of course, creates virtual copies of actual print and other physical resources. Now, LOC turns its attention to what most of us would regard as ephemeral: the tweet. Nothing is really ephemeral on cyberspace, however; messages stay in caches and on servers. Now LOC will preserve this set of bytes for future reference.

Much of it will be, of course, inconsequential unless examined as composite data for statistical social trends and such. But then, there is the Obama victory tweet and others of its ilk.

There used to be concern that web-based information were too ephemeral to be retained as primary source evidence for future historical researchers. It’s a reasonable concern, but the LOC seems to be meeting that challenge.    It’s a critical need as we move into “cloud computing,” in which applications, programs, and files will not be on our computers but rather on servers accessible in cyberspace.

The acquisition announcement was sent out as from @librarycongress as a tweet to its 50,000 followers. That seems fitting.

But part of me wants to know:  a century from now, will researchers understand what a tweet was?

Kathy Carter
Managing Editor, JNCAH
Deep River Press