170 Billion Tweets Archived In Library Of Congress

Over 170 billion tweets have been amassed by the U.S. Library of Congress in its Twitter archive.

After signing an agreement with the Library in 2010, Twitter has been providing the government institution a collection consisting of all public tweets, including an archive of 21 billion tweets since the company's inception in 2006 until 2010.

"An element of our mission at the Library of Congress is to collect the story of America and to acquire collections that will have research value," Library Director of Communications Gayle Osterberg wrote in a blog post Friday. "So when the Library had the opportunity to acquire an archive from the popular social media service Twitter, we decided this was a collection that should be here."

Osterberg announced that the Library's Twitter archive now contains about 170 billion tweets.

"We now have an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets and growing," he said. "The volume of tweets the Library receives each day has grown from 140 million beginning in February 2011 to nearly half a billion tweets each day as of October 2012."

He added, "The Library’s focus now is on addressing the significant technology challenges to making the archive accessible to researchers in a comprehensive, useful way. These efforts are ongoing and a priority for the Library."

The Library has received hundreds of inquiries from researchers all over the world since the announcement that it would accept the Twitter archive. But it has not yet provided researchers access to the archive as its system is still in an "inadequate situation."