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133,000 gigabytes worth of tweets currently takes days to search, but The Library of Congress is nonetheless trying to archive American Twitter use for posterity.

The venerable US institution is assembling all of the 400 million tweets sent by Americans each day, in the belief that each of the mini-messages reflect a small but important part of the national narrative.

"An element of our mission at the Library of Congress is to collect the story of America, and to acquire collections that will have research value," said Gayle Osterberg, director of communications at the library.

The Library of Congress, located off the National Mall in Washington, houses millions of hard copy books and historic documents, and its online archives amass millions of additional works produced by Americans for more than two centuries.

Now it wants to be keeper of the nation's brief internet messages as well: Twitter in April 2010 signed a deal with the Library, giving it access to tweets dating back to the company's inception in 2006.

Collecting the 140-character micro-missives, said Osterberg, is in keeping with the library's main goal "to collect the story of America and to acquire collections that will have research value."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...ll-tweets.html