LoC is actually relatively forward-thinking when it comes to digital archiving. For example, for a while now they've been encouraging people to digitize archives of their own personal data: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/

http://www.loc.gov/webarchiving/faq.html

Specifically, it states:

The types of sites archived include, but are not limited to: United States government (federal, state, district, local), foreign government, candidates for political office, political commentary, political parties, media, religious organizations, support groups, tributes and memorials, advocacy groups, educational and research institutions, creative expressions (cartoons, poetry, etc.), and blogs.

http://scripting.com/stories/2012/07/17/whyTheLocArchivingTw...

"(Note: I mean bloggers. The equivalent content that's on Twitter, but not in a corporate blogging silo.)"

The mission of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) is to acquire, preserve and make accessible knowledge and information from the Internet for future generations everywhere, promoting global exchange and international relations.

They've got a working group working on smart crawlers right now. If you've got some good ideas for making it easier to archive blogs, perhaps you should consider contributing.

We need a new acronym to go with IANAL, something like TIJABP -- This Is Just A Blog Post.

http://scripting.com/stories/2012/07/18/tijabp.html

He said "twitter private, Library of Congress public. Public preference to one of several private corps not in public interest, especially when there is a larger, more archive-worthy corpus that doesn't require private APIs or vendor discrimination".

Which part of that do you disagree with?

Finally, Twitter does have a corporate API, isn't most of it accessible through the open web any way? Any user's profile can be accessed through the website unless they've specifically restricted it.

And generally, I don't see the point in NOT archiving something if you can. Sure it's fine to argue that other things should be archived first, but if someone is going to archive something, why stop them? We only gain by having a more complete and accurate historical record.

99.9999% of what comes through twitter is wasted bits. I still see value in archiving it all to guarantee capturing a real time log of an historic election, the death of a notable person, the announcement of a major discovery, or the day to day thoughts during a protest or revolution.

We have 19th century diaries detailing a rector's daily meals for his entire adult life while we have recovered nearly nothing regarding the poor living in slums in London, except through the distant scornful commentary of the gentry.

The LoC shouldn't be endorsing Twitter as a company, but the users of Twitter have endorsed it by logging the course of human events.

http://scripting.com/stories/2012/07/20/moreOnLocAndTwitter....

Dave

As for why Twitter and not your average blogger...well...because there's a specific endpoint to get all the tweets, each of which is a discrete, well-defined object. Finding all the blogs on the Internet is likely not as easy.

Much more fun is to use an analogy. LoC will arbitrarily by their own high level decision only and exclusively archive ABC TV shows, NBC, CBS, etc, too bad. Or perhaps if they only archived Ford corporate materials and ignore GM and all others.

And we have a say in this in the US, since we pay for the LOC.

You cannot assume companies always act logically. In this case they could have agreed to it just because it was "cool".

They didn't do it out of altruism, they did it because it was excellent publicity.

This is probably accurate, but it doesn't give them a long term advantage. It probably gave them a small boost in marketing (I say small because I have never heard about this). Marketing doesn't hold up without investment. (for those of you who say iconic brands will hold up, keep in mind that every iconic brand advertises constantly.)

Further, the government arbitrarily "subsidizes" businesses constantly. In many cases much more so than Twitter. I agree that any subsidy (whether monetary or otherwise) should be examined, but in this case it seems to be a complete nonissue to me.

And people object to it constantly.

But you really think it is affecting users' actions now months later? I'd be surprised if anyone considers LoC archiving a feature that keeps them locked into Twitter instead of starting a blog. (Notwithstanding LoC's efforts to archive all sorts of digital content... you make it sound like Twitter is an outlier.)