WTF?

[unixronin]

This is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard:  The Library of Congress has just added a digital archive of the entirety of public traffic on Twitter since its founding four years ago.

WTF FOR?!?

Comments

[rosencrantz23.livejournal.com]

this is what happens when librarians try to apply their maxims of data preservation indiscriminately.

I've been seeing this in various forms while at library school the past two years: "we must find ways to make libraries web2.0 compatible! Put everything on a wiki! add a social networking overlay to the catalog! Rewrite the entire cataloging rules to account for electronic materials!" and so on.

The sad part is, charging in blindly ignores one of the fundamental principles of collection development: Find a fscking information need, FIRST. THEN build a collection to satisfy it.

Ranganathan's laws of library science may say "Every reader his book" and "Every book its reader", but those apply to the people using the collection. Ranganathan's laws also say "Books are for use" and "Libraries are growing organisms". If the books (and by extension, anything else in the collection) aren't being used, they should be weeded out to make room for ones that WILL be used. If there isn't an identifiable group wanting to use a new resource, don't allocate funds and space for it.

I ought to rant about this on my lj; it's been a while since I've put something in 025 R7239....

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I see it in part as a failure to distinguish between collecting and organizing information, and accumulating random data for the sake of accumulating data. Even if one can find and track the context, 99% of twitter is ephemeral babble, not only of consequence only to the speaker and a relatively small number of listeners, but relevant strictly to that particular moment in time. Taken as a whole, sans context-of-the-moment, its overall signal-to-noise ratio surely has to be asymptotically approaching zero.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

Sure, but see the point Databeast made above.

That said, I hope the archeaologists of 9,000 AD have awesomely, brilliantly, incredibly good data-mining software.

Because at the rate we've been packing away information for them these last few centuries (and *especially* these last couple of decades), they're damned well going to need it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That said, I hope the archeaologists of 9,000 AD have awesomely, brilliantly, incredibly good data-mining software.

I'll have to remind TTK to leave a set on long-term archival media for them. ;)