Just How, Exactly, is the Library of Congress Going to Decide Which Tweets to Archive?

Simple: They’re going to preserve all 55 million or so of them that are sent into cyberspace every day!

Now, many of us are entertained by the musings of the Twittersphere, but, if you’ll pardon our generalization, most of the 140-characters bursts of expression don’t exactly strike us as worth holding onto in the long term. Sure, it’s nice to know that your friend thinks the latest episode of Glee was rockin’, that Kim Kardashian is launching a new shoe line, or that A.C. Newman just put the finishing touches on a New Pornographers album, but these moments are far from historic in the grand scheme of things. The Library of Congress, however, has a different take: They’re archiving Tweets as a snapshot of history.

According to Matt Raymond, the Library’s director of communications, Tweets have an “immense impact on culture and history,” and they’re worth preserving. That’s why the Library has begun a project to collect and archive the millions of Tweets that occur every day. The endeavor falls under the “Web capture project” already in practice at the Library, in an attempt to record important events reported on the Internet. This open-ended project currently has no time limit, but surely won’t last forever, so keep your Twitter chops up, y’all.

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