Library of Congress Has Now Archived 170 Billion Tweets

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The dream of a library of Twitter is getting closer to reality.

The Library of Congress announced Friday that it is just weeks away from completing its archive of all public tweets from Twitter's launch in 2006 through 2010, but there are technology challenges that need to be figured out before the archive becomes usable.

So far, the national library has compiled a massive collection of about 170 billion tweets from that time period, and expects to finish with this stage of the archive by the end of January. The volume of tweets collected into the archive on a daily basis has grown exponentially from 140 million in early 2011 to 500 million as of October, 2012.

"The Library's first objectives were to acquire and preserve the 2006 -2010 archive; to establish a secure, sustainable process for receiving and preserving a daily, ongoing stream of tweets through the present day; and to create a structure for organizing the entire archive by date," Gayle Osterberg, director of communications for the Library of Congress, wrote in a blog post. "This month, all those objectives will be completed."