ReadWriteWeb

Back when the United States was born, people who needed to do research would sometimes ride a horse for days to get to the nearest library. Today, the U.S. Library of Congress made its THOMAS website for information about legislative activity updatable by tweet. We are truly living in the future.

There may be millions of webpages around the Internet that display a widget of recent Tweets, but when the Library of Congress does it, I think that's notable because of the organization's prominence, its public role and its complicated relationship with transparency. "One of our goals with the Twitter account is to provide timely alerts about legislative developments and, with this change, now we can do that directly from the homepage," explained Andrew Weber, Senior Legal Information Analyst at the Library of Congress this morning, in a post on the Library's blog.

The U.S. Library of Congress, in conjunction with Sony Music Entertainment, has launched a new website today, the National Jukebox. The site will stream some 10,000 sound recordings from several historic music collections. This includes music and other audio recordings from the Victor Records collection, one closely associated with the early Victrola hand-cranked record players.

The songs can all be listened to for free online, but they cannot be downloaded.

The National Jukebox launches with recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925 and contains a rich history of American music, including Fanny Brice singing the original "My Man" and Theodore Roosevelt giving a speech on "The Farmer and the Businessman.

Remember those pieces of paper with handwritten words on them that you used to post to people? "Letters" I think they're called. To be honest though, I wouldn't have a clue, as I've neither sent nor received one in my 16-year-old life.

I'm sure the majority of readers here have at least sent a personal letter to friends or family in their lifetime. However, the same cannot be said about my generation. I've sent tens of thousands of emails, Facebook messages, SMSs, and IMs - but never a single letter.

More than solely being a form of communication, letters are a very effective historical item. Think about letters sent home to families from the soldiers on the battlefields of both world wars. Letters were kept because they have a perceived value - it took time and effort to send a letter, and therefore people viewed them as much more valuable.

Universal Music Group, largest of the "big four" music companies, has made the single largest donation of music ever to the Library of Congress. The donation consists of over 200,000 metal masters, discs and tape from the late Twenties to 1950. Highlights include the master of Louis Armstrong's version of "AintMisbehavin.mp3" and Les Paul's "Guitar Boogie."

Although conserving such a large and important collection of American music is important in general, what makes it really exciting are the plans to digitize it and make it available online.

Last week, an approved application that gives mobile users access to the United States Library of Congress Experience went live in the iTunes App Store. The app is compatible with iOS 3.1 on up and will run on the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

The new app (iTunes link) won't provide avid Twitter users access to their archived tweets just yet, unfortunately, nor will it enable mobile users to go deep into the digitized archives of the world's largest library, but it will extend the award-winning virtual experience to tens of millions of mobile users.

The Library of Congress added a number of ambitious new exceptions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act's prohibition of breaking copyright technologies today, most notably concerning iPhone jailbreaking and unlocking. The Library adds and renews exceptions every 3 years and as Sarah Perez argued this morning, these ones go well beyond the iPhone.

I'd like to take this opportunity to celebrate "fair use," the general principle that copyrighted materials can legitimately be used by other parties, without payment, within reasonable limits. It's not just legally acceptable, it's a paradigm that could provide a foundation for a richer, fairer, better future for everyone.

The Library of Congress and Columbia University are taking steps to assure we keep our maps intact through a partnership to provide best practices, methods and services to assist organizations in preserving geospatial data.

Through its partnership with Columbia, the Library of Congress is creating a digital clearinghouse of maps and satellite images that are important for preserving the unique insights that geospatial data provides.

I was on vacation when the news came through that Twitter was going to archive all past and future tweets with the Library of Congress. I'm a big fan of Twitter.

When Twitter announced last week that every public tweet since its inception in 2006 would be archived in the Library of Congress, many people were excited.  

"The Twitter digital archive has extraordinary potential for research into our contemporary way of life," says James Billington, Librarian of Congress. "Anyone who wants to understand how an ever-broadening public is using social media to engage in an ongoing debate regarding social and cultural issues will have need of this material."

The U.S. Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. In addition to a massive printed collection, the Library already has an extensive collection of other digital assets. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world.

The Library does extensive work with data format standards, the semantic Web and other platforms for outside analysis. The addition of Twitter into the organization's offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research. From a new kind of historical record to an unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction, this is big.