Library of Congress has announced that it will create a digital archive for all public tweets published since March 2006.  The average number of daily tweets is 50 million.  According to the Library of Congress: “If you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000.  Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.”  Several questions arise from the perspective of information management:  How will these tweets be archived to ensure long-term preservation and access; what search mechanisms will be put in place to help people search through terabytes of data; how will it enable searching in multilingual platforms, given the universal nature of Twitter? 

Get caught up on SIM’s news – this issue covers July to December 2009.

http://sim.management.dal.ca/Files/Inform/Inform_v._38_n._2.pdf

The amount of information in our digital universe is expected to double in size every 18 months, according to a recent report – so how do universities choose which of these new information bits to keep and which to discard?

Increasingly, university managers and researchers are looking to justify the cost of preservation alongside other technical and legal issues. Now a new international task force funded by JISC and other organisations is highlighting examples of current practice in the UK, America and Europe to look at business cases for long term preservation and access. For further information, please follow the podcast.