Library of Congress Offers Update On Huge Twitter Archive Project 88
Nerval's Lobster writes "Back in April 2010, the Library of Congress agreed to archive four years' worth of public Tweets. Even by the standards of the nation's most famous research library, the goal was an ambitious one. The librarians needed to build a sustainable system for receiving and preserving an enormous number of Tweets, then organize that dataset by date. At the time, Twitter also agreed to provide future public Tweets to the Library under the same terms, meaning any system would need the ability to scale up to epic size. The resulting archive is around 300 TB in size. But there's still a huge challenge: the Library needs to make that huge dataset accessible to researchers in a way they can actually use. Right now, even a single query of the 2006-2010 archive takes as many as 24 hours to execute, which limits researchers' ability to do work in a timely way."
Stuck in a loop here.... (Score:4, Funny)
So, just how many 'Libraries of Congress' are there in 300TB? ;-)
Does this mean that as the archives swell, the metric does also?
Where does this madness end?