Digital Archives Do Not Fit In Libraries
Via The NYTimes (and other places):
The [Library of Congress] will archive the collected works of Twitter, the blogging service, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 million messages, all that contain 140 or fewer characters.
Mr. Raymond said that the archive would be available only for scholarly and research purposes.
It’s interesting that The Library of Congress is so focused on saving this data, and seems to consider accessing it later a secondary concern. We see this approach to archiving all the time at Perpetually. Unlike physical assets (think books), storage of digital assets (think Twitter messages) is really not very difficult. The hard part is building an efficient system to retrieve this data. Twitter’s billions of short messages make this point even clearer.
