Are we all published authors now?

Wednesday, the Library of Congress announced (fittingly, on Twitter) it will acquire all public posts on Twitter. Yep – all of them, since Twitter’s inception in 2006. The total number of tweets is somewhere in the billions, and Twitter says 50 million tweets are posted each day alone.

Since 2000, the Library of Congress has been collecting information and data from the Web. According to its Web site, it currently has more than 167 terabytes of information from the Internet stored – much of it political, such as legal blogs and candidates’ Web sites.

What does this mean for associations, and for all of us who use Twitter for personal purposes?

Well, unless your tweets are protected, they’ll be preserved for all time in the Library of Congress, for future scholars to study and learn from.

Now, I don’t really think future scholars are going to be interested in some of the trite things I share on my own Twitter account, but taken as a whole, our collective tweets are probably fascinating. Twitter lets normal people give a commentary on local, national and international events. It’s a barometer for what we’re all talking about and how we feel about the news. Remember the situation in Iran last summer? Citizens used Twitter to get information out about what was going with the election.

Although Twitter’s real-time search is fantastic and useful, its archives don’t go back further than two weeks or so, which can make searching for old tweets complicated.

Consider all of the documents your association keeps for future reference. All the tweets with your event’s hashtag? You’ll have access to them for more than a few months. I think that’s pretty worthwhile. You’ll be able to see what attendees liked, what they didn’t and get quotes from people for future marketing materials.

Would your organization ever take advantage of this information? What do you think about tweets being preserved in the Library of Congress? Will this affect what you post publicly on Twitter?