The Library of Congress started taking steps in 2010 toward preserving the nation’s increasingly digital heritage — by acquiring Twitter’s entire archive of tweets and planning to make it all available to researchers. This interesting news came from Politico in their article, “Library of Congress’ Twitter archive is a huge #FAIL.”

Yes, you read that right. The entire archive of tweets. Many saw it as progressive and forward thinking. Many laughed and waited on the sidelines to point and laugh when they failed.

Now more than five years later, the project is in limbo. To say they bit off more than they could chew is an understatement. How do you manage an archive that amounts to something like half a trillion tweets?
Well, you should start with a taxonomy – a really big one.

Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies. By focusing on making information findable, we produce knowledge organization that works.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.