It sounds like a joke, but it could cost taxpayers a lot of money and now Congress is starting to question plans by the Library of Congress to collect the world’s 140-character tweets.
“I just don’t quite understand,” said Rep. Ander Crenshaw, the Florida congressman who chairs the legislative branch subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, which would fund the Twitter archive. Not a big Twitter user, he ‘fessed, “I haven’t come across one yet that would warrant storage.”
Twitter has offered its archive to the Library and James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, told a Crenshaw hearing today that he wants them. But not all of the mostly mundane or innocuous thoughts users pop online. “I don’t want to get into trouble for hoarding,” he said.
While he argued that the book-laden library is moving into collecting social media, tweets present a problem, mostly in figuring out what’s so important about them. “What’s the research value?” asked Billington. And he doesn’t know that answer yet because Twitter hasn’t decided what it will deliver to the library yet.
He pledge to keep costs down, but some lawmakers worried about the price of storage. “I can’t even imagine how much space you would need,” said Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, a Missouri Republican. Crenshaw, meanwhile suggested to Washington Secrets that a college volunteer to store the tweets.
If the project moves forward, the tweets will likely be part of the public archive, prompting Crenshaw and Emerson to offer some advice to House members. “Be careful what you tweet,” said Crenshaw. “And be careful of your spelling,” added Emerson.
