Archiving and Preserving Social Media at the Library of Congress: Institutional and Cultural Challenges to Build a Twitter Archive

Abstract

Abstract Institutional archiving of media is neither new nor strange. The United States Library of Congress has been preserving printed materials, newspapers, photographs, film, and even websites for decades—if not centuries. After seven years, in later 2017, the initiative to build a Twitter Archive came to a halt. Through a textual analysis of policy papers, preservation theories and press releases, this study illustrates the social, cultural, and symbolic challenges of institutional archiving of digital media.