A Brief History of the Library’s Tweet Collection

The Library of Congress announced its acquisition of the Twitter archive in April 2010 with a blog post titled, “How Tweet It Is!” At the time, Twitter saw more than 50 million tweets every day, and the acquisition comprised billions of tweets.[i] 

According to the gift agreement, tweets older than six months could be posted to the Library’s website or made available to approved researchers for specifically non-commercial use. Tweets could not be made available in a way that would allow for bulk downloading of the information.[ii] The transfer of the tweets from Twitter to the Library of Congress began in February 2011 with tweets from December 2010. The full 2006-2010 archive was received in February 2012, comprising about 21 billion tweets. By the end of 2012, the Library had received a further 150 billion tweets.[iii]

In January 2013, the Library had finished the acquisition and preservation of the original 2006-2010 archive, including establishing systems for receiving, preserving, and organizing the incoming tweets. By that time, the full archive comprised about 170 billion tweets and over 300 terabytes of information. The amount of incoming tweets had grown to 140 million per day in February 2011 and then to almost 500 million per day in October 2012.

Access to researchers was not made available, although the library had received about 400 inquiries about topics ranging from elected officials’ communications to predicting stock market activity.[iv] At the time a single search of the smaller 2006-2010 archive could take 24 hours and so was untenable for research activity.[v]

In December 2017 the Library decided to change the collections practice for Twitter. The Library will now limit the scope of the collection by acquiring tweets on a selective basis, matching its practices for the collection of websites.[vi] The Library plans to collect tweets around themes or events including elections and public policy. The 2006-2017 archive of tweets will continue to exist as a standing collection, but access to the collection by the public and researchers will remain unavailable until a solution to searching and access problems is resolved. [vii]

References

[i] “How Tweet It Is!: Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive.” Library of Congress Blog. April 14, 2010. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/

[ii] “Gift Agreement.” Library of Congress. Accessed January 20, 2018. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/files/2010/04/LOC-Twitter.pdf

[iii] Library of Congress. Update on the Twitter Archive At the Library of Congress. January 2013. https://www.loc.gov/static/managed-content/uploads/sites/6/2017/02/twitter_report_2013jan.pdf

[iv] “Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress.” Library of Congress Blog. January 4, 2013. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2013/01/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress/

[v] Library of Congress. Update on the Twitter Archive At the Library of Congress. January 2013. https://www.loc.gov/static/managed-content/uploads/sites/6/2017/02/twitter_report_2013jan.pdf

[vi] “Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress.” Library of Congress Blog. Published December 26, 2017. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress-2/

[vii] Library of Congress. Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress. December 2017. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/files/2017/12/2017dec_twitter_white-paper.pdf

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Happily the times they are a changin’ and the Library of Congress has changed with them. The beautiful Thomas Jefferson Building that I remember from my youth now houses The Young Readers Center. Opened in October 2009, the center offers books and programming for children and teens. It’s opening marked the first time the library had extended its services specifically to young people.

Our new Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, is looking to expand those services with extended hours, the center is now open on Saturdays, and offers programming designed to engage children and their families. The library will also begin offering interactive guided tours specifically for families with young children and Hayden has plans to hold concerts, classes, and eventually a makerspace for children to enjoy. Hayden hopes to make the library’s impressive collection available to everyone through traveling exhibitions to give people around the country a taste of what the library has on display in its galleries.

A visit to the library’s website shows many of the same things we highlight on our own websites; community resources for families, booklists, upcoming programs, and contests for young readers. Hayden would also like to see the libraries online presence expanded by making use of the new Virtual Reality technology becoming increasingly popular in libraries so that children around the country who can’t make it to the library still have a chance to take a tour.

The library was established in 1800 and even today is considered primarily as a research facility for Congress. But now it can also be a place to help introduce young people and their families to all the amazing things a library offers. The Library of Congress has gone miles beyond the place I remember. I think it might be time to plan another visit with my​ children.

Resources

The Library of Congress, 2009: http://wtop.com/dc/2017/01/library-congress-debuts-center-young-readers-saturday/

The Library of Congress, 2017: http://www.read.gov/yrc/

https://www.loc.gov/about/frequently-asked-questions/#where_books

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/the-worlds-biggest-library-wants-to-place-its-treasures-at-your fingertips/2017/02/17/46ed811a-f47b-11e6-a9b0-ecee7ce475fc_story.html?utm_term=.e22e99c73ef8

The post This Library Isn’t Just For Congress Anymore first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The Polonsky Foundation, a UK registered charity, made a generous donation to the Library of Congress that made the digitization process achievable. The foundation regularly supports various facets of scholarship in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. This grant is not the foundation’s first foray into helping fund the digitization of significant collections at key libraries; they have also supported the New York Public Library, Vatican Apostolic Library, and Cambridge University Library. Dr. Leonard Polonsky, CBE said, “We are delighted to support the Library of Congress in the important project of making Freud’s legacy more widely available, both to researchers and the broader public.

The collection consists of several groups of material. Among them are:

• Family Papers (1851-1978): estate records, legal documents, school records, and immigration papers;
• General Correspondence (1871-1996): original letters, transcripts, and correspondences with notable figures such as Karl Abraham, C.G. Jung, and Otto Rank;
• Subject File (1856-1988): school university and military records, patient case files, wills, and other printed matter;
• Writings (1877-1985): holographs of manuscripts, printed publications, and galley proofs;
• Interviews and Recollections (1914–1998): interviews with Freud’s associates, patients, and family members conducted by K.R. Eissler; and additional ephemera and oversized artifacts.

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Some of this is due to contractual agreements between the content holder of copyright and the aggregator database provider such as ProQuest and EBSCOhost. We also find individuals lose their rights-to-access because print content that was once available on the Internet Public Library is now only available digitally as part of aggregators such as Project MUSE and JSTOR. Unless the individual has a library nearby which subscribes to these databases, individuals would have to subscribe to the databases when in most case, they only wanted to read one article. This makes libraries indispensable to access, yet perhaps because of the contractual agreement they are not able to give access to the person wanting the information because they are ‘out of bounds’ of the region or the academic institution. I remember once paying $30 gain access to a book my daughter needed for her master’s degree work. Interlibrary Loan system used to work, but with current licensing, that is not always the case.

There is another disappearing act of websites being taken down, though these are sometimes available through the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. The archive doesn’t capture everything, nor do they capture at any regular interval some of the websites with valuable information and data. I found one university website which was deleted but had come back as the same URL with totally different information. This sort of thing has happened with ISBNs as well; the reuse of them is a serious breach of the program, but it happens frequently enough to be wary of what you are trying to get. In one scenario, a student can’t get access to a certain music methods publication because the database subscribed to by the university dropped the magazine due to their contract with the content owner. In another, the information on Climate Change and Civil Rights was taken down from White House shortly after Trump took office as President.

There have been efforts to save this disappearing data. DataRefuge is one group trying to preserve climate data. GitHub is also working on a method to save digital content from extinction. The Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and CLIR have all been involved in what is now known as “born digital’ information and data and are actively attempting to help contain its demise. Yale University is involved as are many other institutions.

I’m not sure if this loss of digital content will change what our future populations will know as history or not, but some of the information loss will surely change some of the data available to researchers and historians and possible conclusions brought to that research. We do live in a strange universe where we now have researchers trying to replicate standing research to see if it was done correctly with the right conclusions specifically, on health issues. Without that older information, this action would not be available to us, leading us to new information and understanding.

It may be a smart idea for public libraries to update the knowledge found in older work the way law books and encyclopedia’s yearbooks receive updates.  This helps citizens and consumers with information to update their current understanding. With some articles on the net, we often see announcements “updated {date}” but I wonder how many people go back to review the old article (possibly bad or erroneous) or even that updated article, but continue to tell others; spreading the erroneous message/information. And, are libraries capturing this changing information?

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Some libraries have automatic approval orders. Those are the kind of orders in which the publishers, jobbers, or distributors send everything, and someone at the library decides whether or not an item is kept or sent back to the publisher or distributor. Many of these returned books end up at bookstores and elsewhere as ‘remainders’ at a very low price.

Recent information from the book world tells us it is currently likely that only 250 copies of a given nonfiction title will ever be sold, and only a 1 percent chance it will show up at a bookstore. Yet, with around 119,500 libraries throughout the U.S., if libraries are really in the business of preserving and giving access to what has been written, it seems strange there wouldn’t be more sales. With 725,000 self-published books available each year, and around 300,000 books published by the big 5 houses, it becomes a gargantuan task. Should libraries try?

Contemporary composers’ alliances and groups are now trying to organize and preserve new music, scores, and recordings of productions. Some collectors are still trying to collect all of the output of some artists’ works and recordings. One has to wonder what the library world is doing to preserve the printed published word. Yes, libraries do have options and opportunities to preserve some things, manage what’s best for their particular audience or customers, and within constraints of budgets, get to preserve some things. And yes there are digitization preservation programs going on to format such printed material in order to have space for it all.

We don’t know what happens to all those returned remainders when no one buys them. Although I know bookstores dump the returns in the dumpsters (after tearing off the covers for returning and getting credit) when they might have been preserved elsewhere. At one point a prison library was able to get a bookstore to donate its unreturnable books, with the library realizing full retail price tax deductions. While the prison was not in the business of preservation, it did in a way, keep the books available if only through Interlibrary Loan. One inmate at the prison wrote to the Detroit Public Library seeking a book, thinking it wouldn’t be in his small prison library; DPL did not have it, the prison library did.

Libraries are doing what they can, but discoverability is becoming increasingly difficult with OP books and OBP (out of business publishers) and M&A (mergers and acquisitions publishers). At a forum of the 66th Frankfurt Book Fair, deputy editor of The Bookseller’s Futurebook, summed it up nicely when he said: “It’s a great thing that everybody can publish a book today, and it’s a bad thing that everybody can publish a book today.”

Mostly, it falls to our national libraries such as the Library of Congress to collect all the books. This works if everyone registers for copyright, as a book or books are to be placed in the LC as part of the copyright process. This kind of preservation won’t work any longer now with eBooks and the cost of changing an address for single book authors. It will be up to consortia to figure out who collects what. Some years ago, the libraries of Wales, United Kingdom had developed a cooperative program to collect all recordings from all labels produced in the country. Different libraries would collect everything in a specified genre, then share (interlibrary loans) when the need required. There are some consortia for cooperative collection development such as ALA’s Transforming Libraries goal and objectives strategic plan of 2010 and the book “Shared Collections: Collaborative Stewardship”. Each group has some documentation of progress in their respective groups, but will there be a central organization to tell us who has what?

We have had Gap Analysis projects for training, diversity, and electronic resources, but in my very short bit of research, I see no Gap Analysis project which tells us what books,genres, and resources libraries don’t have. R. R. Bowker, The Library of Congress, OCLC, Hathi-Trust, WorldCat, and FirstSearch databases are helping, but finding a library with the work one wants and actually has available, is pretty daunting. Will we find a way, both of discovery and retrieval, and for preserving contemporary works? We may need very large initiatives of state-wide and national projects to even come close.

There are of course arguments for and against preserving all information in any of the formats. Is leaving it to the collectors a good plan?

The post Book? Book? Do You Know Where This Book Is? first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Words are powerful, and the Library of Congress (LC) regularly changes its subject headings to reflect the preferred or most neutral terminology used by the population. Most of the time, there is no major uproar when a subject heading is changed, but the recent retirement of the “illegal alien” subject heading has caused some politicians in Congress to order the Library of Congress to keep the subject heading to match the current legal language.^[1][2]

This change made by the LC was not necessarily a political move, although it has now become a political issue. The LC often looks at proposals to change their subject headings and, in fact, had denied the same request to change the subject heading “illegal alien” in 2014.^[3] It was only when a group of students from Dartmouth College formed a coalition called CoFIRED (Coalition for Immigration Reform, Equality and DREAMers), along with the help of different librarian associations, petitioned the LC to stop using the term that the proposal was accepted. CoFIRED calls “illegal alien” a “dehumanizing, inaccurate, offensive, and inflammatory term.”^[4]

Despite being used in law, the LC believes that the term has now become pejorative and instead of using “illegal alien,” would use the more neutral “noncitizen,” and “unauthorized immigration” to refer to the broader issue.^[5] House Republicans argue that “illegal alien” is not a pejorative term but is simply the definition of someone who enters into the country from a foreign country without authorization. House Democrats argue that the U.S. Code is often “slow to catch up to the times,” with words like “negro,” “oriental,” and “retarded” all being used at some points.^[6] Although “illegal alien” does technically mean what the Republicans are arguing, it is often used to refer to a very specific demographic, thereby, arguably, making the term indeed pejorative.

What nullifies the challengers’ point, however, is that even if the term “illegal alien” remains retired, it will still be cross-referenced to “noncitizen”; a “see noncitizen” statement would follow someone’s search of “illegal alien.” In “Ethnic Groups and Library of Congress Subject Headings,” J. Beall states that “using a controlled vocabulary with cross references from variant forms of names is crucial to providing access to these materials.”^[7] The digital catalog has made this transition very easy. Those who feel strongly about the legal speak can still look up information using “illegal alien” and then proceed through “noncitizen” to obtain their materials.

Since librarianship is a profession that stays on the forefront of change, especially in recent years, librarians need to be reminded that we can and do actually positively affect our society. In 1972, after a letter was sent to the LC requesting the reclassification of books dealing with the subject of homosexuality under the category of “Abnormal Sexual Relations, Including Sexual Crimes” to a less pejorative one, the LC decided to change the subject heading to “Homosexuality, Lesbianism—Gay Liberation Movement, Homophile Movement.”^[8] As Charles Duhigg describes in his book, The Power of Habit, “News of the new policy spread across the nation. … Within a few years, openly gay politicians were running for political office in California, New York, Massachusetts, and Oregon, many of them citing the Library of Congress’s decision as inspiration.”^[9] Indeed, the reclassification was so influential that the Gay Rights movement was not making any headway before it at all.^[10] This issue is not about being politically correct or whitewashing a term until it has no meaning; it is about making stigmatized terms neutral so that society can move forward.

References

[1] Lisa Peet, “Library of Congress Drops Illegal Alien Subject Heading, Provokes Backlash Legislation,” Library Journal, June 13, 2016.

[2] Stephen Dinan, “House orders Library of Congress to maintain ‘illegal alien’,” Washington Times, June 10, 2016.

[3] Jessica Chasmar, “Library of Congress drops term ‘illegal alien’ after Dartmouth students protest,” Washington Times, March 30, 2016.

[4] Lisa Peet, “Library of Congress Drops Illegal Alien Subject Heading, Provokes Backlash Legislation.”

[5] Stephen Dinan, “House orders Library of Congress to maintain ‘illegal alien’.”

[6] Ibid.

[7] J Beale, “Ethnic Groups and Library of Congress Subject Headings,” Colorado Libraries 32, no. 4 (2006): 37–44.

[8] Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2014), 44.

[9] Duhigg, The Power of Habit, 99.

[10] Duhigg, The Power of Habit, 99–100.

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The memorabilia, which is now available at the click of a button, includes everything from Parks’ Congressional Gold Medal to her recipe for featherlite pancakes. Parks, who made history in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus, saved a large collection of handwritten letters from the time, as well as family photographs and greeting cards sent to thank her. According to the Washington Post, “There are little-known photos of her husband, who was also an activist and who quietly supported her and weathered death threats as she traveled the country.”[1]

The digitized collection can be easily viewed by scholars and students alike. The Library of Congress has made a Primary Source Gallery available, as well as Teachers Guides to the collection. Other interesting contributions by the Library of Congress include a timeline of Parks’ life, and a video titled, “The Rosa Parks Collection: Telling Her Story at the Library of Congress,” which touches on the highlights of the collection.

Students can also read about the conservation process and how even Parks’ collection of political buttons was given special consideration. Another story involves a Holman Bible that Parks owned. Staff discovered that the Bible was rather rare, and had a hard time determining the order for unnumbered pages. According to the Library of Congress, “The goal of the Library’s Conservation Division was—and continues to be—to preserve these items for generations to come through responsible collection stewardship.”[2]

Most of the collection is now available online, while some materials can only be through the Manuscripts and Prints and Photographs reading rooms. David Mao, acting librarian of Congress, told the Washington Post, “It’s a great privilege to open the Rosa Parks Collection and help people worldwide discover more about her active life and her deep commitment to civil rights.”[3]

References:

[1] Michael E. Ruane, “Digitized collection of Rosa Parks is online, thanks to Library of Congress,” Washington Post, February 24, 2015.

[2] “Conservation of the Rosa Parks Papers,” Library of Congress, accessed April 5, 2016.

[3] Michael E. Ruane, “Digitized collection of Rosa Parks is online, thanks to Library of Congress,” Washington Post, February 24, 2015.

Resources:

Rosa Parks Papers Collection

Rosa Parks Collection Video

Library of Congress Web Guides

Further Reading:

Price, Gary. “Just Announced: The Rosa Parks Collection Digitized and Now Available Online.” InfoDocket. February 25, 2016.

The post Library of Congress Shares Rosa Parks Collection first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

President and First Lady Obama are well aware of her qualifications, having known her since her days at the Chicago Public Library. The President, in a White House statement, applauded Hayden’s passion for digital literacy, noting that, “Dr. Hayden has devoted her career to modernizing libraries so that everyone can participate in today’s digital culture.”[1] Furthermore, the potential fourteenth Librarian of Congress has demonstrated a strong history of social justice. In a White House video, she remembers keeping the Enoch Pratt Free Library open during the social unrest in Baltimore, knowing the community would need a safe place to go. “People were so relieved to have a safe place to be,” she recalls.[2]

Hayden’s list of impressive qualifications include Library Associate and Children’s Librarian at the Chicago Public Library in 1973, to teaching at the University of Pittsburgh from 1987 to 1991, to being the President of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004. Additionally, she was nominated for a position on the National Museum and Library Services Board by President Obama in 2010 and confirmed by the Senate six months later.

Hayden would replace the current Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, aged eighty-six, who officially stepped down on January 1, 2016, after twenty-eight years of service.[3] While Billington had ushered the Library of Congress into the digital age, many felt he had perhaps stayed on the job too long, according to a Washington Post article.[4]  She knows her potential new job will have a great deal of influence, and has observed that her position would affect  “how people view the future of libraries and what a national library can be. It’s inclusive. It can be part of everyone’s story” [5]

References:

[1] Office of the Press Secretary, “President Obama Announces His Intent to Nominate Carla D. Hayden as Librarian of Congress,” press release on the White House [website], February 24, 2016.

[2] “Meet President Obama’s Nominee for Librarian of Congress,” YouTube video, 3:46, on the White House website, posted by “The White House,” February 24, 2016.

[3] “After Nearly 30 Years, Librarian Of Congress Is Calling It Quits,” by Bill Naylor, National Public Radio, last updated June 11, 2015.

[4] Peggy McGlone, “America’s ‘national library’ is lacking in leadership, yet another report finds,” Washington Post, March 31, 2015.

[5] Elizabeth Blair, “Obama Nominates Carla Hayden To Lead Library Of Congress,” National Public Radio, February 24, 2016.

Resources:

Enoch Pratt Free Library

Chicago Public Library

“The Next Librarian of Congress?” Inside Higher Ed.

The post Dr. Carla Hayden Nominated for Librarian of Congress first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Working with government policymakers: Stiftung Lesen’s Lesestart, a program in Germany, supports libraries in educating parents about the importance of reading aloud to their children. A mix of non-profit and government partners provide book packs to families with young children, including pediatricians, libraries, and schools. In receiving the book packs from diverse groups, Lesestart teaches parents that reading affects many facets of their children’s life and development.

Creating a community of literacy: The Family Reading Partnership, located in Ithaca, NY, targets parents and children at different stages of development to support early literacy in children ages 0-5. Expectant mothers receive a children’s picture book as well as an adult book on the importance of literacy at prenatal visits, and children receive a higher level book when they register for kindergarten, marking the next stage of education.

Selecting appropriate language of instruction: Worldreader, located in Barcelona, Spain, serves fifty countries in Africa and Asia in providing access to over 27,000 e-books in forty-three languages. Books are distributed through e-readers and mobile phones in low- and middle-income countries served where phones are often more common than bathrooms or running water. Large international publishers donate licenses and small local publishers give large discounts to some of their best works.

Literacy in service of social goals: Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop serves youth who have been charged as adults in Washington, DC jails and federal prisons. The three-stage program motivates inmates to read with both reading and writing projects.

Providing access to readers with disabilities: Men with a Message Braille Program relies on eleven residents of the James T. Vaughn Correctional Facility in Delaware who create materials for visually-impaired residents of Delaware, and the American Printing House allows much of their work to reach the entire nation. Visually-impaired readers request translation of materials that range from worksheets and textbooks from K-12 classrooms, poetry and plays, and religious texts used for worship.

Click here to read more about these and other extraordinary literacy programs. See if any of the innovative techniques spark ideas you can use in your own organization.

Sources

http://www.read.gov/documents/BestPractices2015.pdf

http://www.read.gov/literacyawards/index.html

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