What is the value of the Library of Congress making all tweets available?

I have been fascinated by the Library of Congress (LOC) and Google becoming the keepers of the twitter archive.  First of all, I am amazed at the pure size of the data with approximately 5 terabytes of server space currently needed and somewhere around 35 million tweets being produced each day.

Second of all, it gets the market researcher side of me excited about the potential data mining possibilities as a pure market researcher. There is the potential to get live feedback on your organizations actions as a way to measure ROI.  That is something that most information professionals don't ever get to see in a real-time scenario. I can see endless possibilities to get intelligence on all sort of issues.

There is a great article that was posted this morning on the Information Today website that is titled: Searching Every Public Tweet Ever Twittered.  It lays out what will be available, the issues surrounding this, and what it means in a concise manner.  

I would like to know how many of the HOA membership currently utilize Twitter and how you feel about the platform.

 

Comments

[Ed Burgess]

The CARL has a Twitter account, but I'm not convinced it's been very valuable. So far we've used it in exactly the same way we use RSS and a blog and a web page and our college's daily announcements. The conversational aspect, to say nothing of immediacy, is something we have not been able to effectively instantiate. Organizationally it's a time sink, and there are other projects (but is any project more important than telling your followers what's going on in the library?) Jury's still out, I think.

[Joan]

I have a personal twitter account that I use just about every day. It helps me stay on top of the really interesting things happening in the library world and in the smaller law library world. It's a huge help with current awareness. I've formed some really good bonds with librarians I've never even met. It's a fascinating social experiment! We have not used it in my private law library setting.

[Hilary Berndt]

We are doing it in our organization to some degree, but we are still looking at how to measure ROI. I personally think that is one of the big frustrations for me with social media. I think the jury is generally out at this point for most organizations.