In April 2010, the U.S. Library of Congress and Twitter announced that Twitter will donate its public Twitter conversation data to the Library of Congress archives, making it available for researchers to read and preserving it for generations to come. This was an historic moment: for the first time, a communication channel in the social media space had been identified as a relic of our culture, emblematic of the role technology has come to play in our interactions with one another.

Today we’re honored to announce that Gnip is playing a key role in the this project by delivering past and future Twitter data to the Library of Congress for historic preservation in the archives.

On a technical level, the magnitude of this project is enormous: with over a billion Tweets being generated weekly, the scale of data delivery involved in this project is historic. We’ve learned a lot from this project and it is clear that some of the outcomes from this project will benefit Gnip’s future product offerings.  We look forward to sharing some of the technical details in the future at the appropriate time.

As a company, we couldn’t be more pleased to be a part of this momentous project. We’re eager to see what kind of research develops from the public archive made accessible by the Library of Congress. We’ve watched with awe as news of world-changing events like the Arab Spring and Osama Bin Laden’s death have flowed through our servers, and now we’re proud to be part of ensuring these historic events will be preserved for our posterity.

The archive of Twitter data which Gnip delivers to the Library of Congress will cater to the needs of researchers who wish to use limited amounts of public Twitter data for non-commercial purposes. Gnip will continue to serve those seeking realtime data, full-coverage data, and commercial use cases.

Thanks to Twitter and the Library of Congress for making this announcement possible. We couldn’t be more excited to be working with you both.