By Wailin Wong |
The Library of Congress has almost 142 million items in its vast
collection, including more than 32 million books and more than 62
million manuscripts. Now it’s adding Twitter posts. Every single tweet,
in fact, since the microblogging service was started in March 2006.

“That’s a lot of tweets, by the way,” Matt Raymond, the library’s
director of communications, wrote in a Wednesday blog post announcing
the initiative. “Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every
day, with the total numbering in the billions.”

Tweets of historical importance include the first post on the service: “just setting up my twttr” from co-founder Jack Dorsey March 21, 2006, and two separate posts (“arrested” and “Free”) from photojournalist Jack Buck, who was able to seek help from Twitter users after being detained in Egypt in 2008.

Raymond said the library has been collecting Web information since 2000, amassing such content as legal blogs and Web sites of people who run for national office.

“It boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data,” he wrote. “And I’m certain we’ll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive.”