Since it was founded in 1913, the German National Library has collected all publications in writing, images and sound that are published in and about Germany or in the German language. That’s what the statutory collection mandate wants, and that’s what happens at the locations of Germany’s central archive library in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main. That’s why the stocks are piled up on a good 410 kilometers of shelves, every year 7.4 kilometers or 2.3 million works are added to the stacks. Systematically recorded, cataloged and permanently stored, they form something like the memory of the nation.
The German National Library has also been collecting digital works since 2006, regularly archiving snapshots of important websites with the top-level domain .de – more than ten million online publications come together in this way. So far, content from social networks has not been included, but now they want it Archivists back up all German-language tweets as quickly as possible, four billion in number. Because since Elon Musk took over the short message service, many users, politicians and celebrities have deleted their profiles and posts. What one does not necessarily have to understand as a loss personally or socially endangers a cultural asset from the point of view of the collector.
At the beginning of February, Twitter also announced that it would cut the data interfaces for scientific evaluations, which was the final impetus for large-scale storage for project manager Britta Woldering. In order to preserve the nation’s short-term memory for eternity, it needs users with scientific access, because they have access to the entire Twitter archive and can download tens of millions of tweets a month. A lone fighter would still need 33 years to save all German-language tweets. If Woldering finds 400 supporters with a scientific Twitter login, the data is saved within a month. The German National Library provides the archive servers for permanent storage.
“And: Hello, Twitter!” from the chancellor
When downloading, the experts proceed strictly chronologically. The German-language contributions from the years 2006 to 2010 were secured by the end of last week. That sounds like a lot, but it’s just 50 million. At least the classic welcome tweets by German politicians are preserved for posterity, such as the shy-looking question from Christian Lindner (FDP) in March 2010: “Who wants to be my first follower? 😉 “ At that time there were only six likes, to date at least more than 680,000 followers.
Until the Twitter debut of the first official Chancellor account “And: Hello, Twitter!” from February 2022 will be stored for library users, it needs more than the handful of supporters who have participated so far. The archive will probably later be used more for systematic data analysis than for searching for individual accounts or quotes from politicians, says Woldering. If the archiving is successful, researchers and curious citizens can at some point sift through the historical Twitter timelines on the computer in the reading rooms in Leipzig or Frankfurt.