Politico: Library of Congress Twitter Archive Project in “Limbo”

In the spring of 2010, the Library of Congress announced it was taking a big stride toward preserving the nation’s increasingly digital heritage — by acquiring Twitter’s entire archive of tweets and planning to make it all available to researchers.
“How Tweet It Is!” the library said in an exuberant blog post, which generated fanfare from tech sites, the mainstream media, librarian blogs and, of course, Twitter. For the two-century-old library, it was evidence that even an institution that traces its heritage to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson can break new ground in social media.
But more than five years later, the project is in limbo. The library is still grappling with how to manage an archive that amounts to something like half a trillion tweets. And the researchers are still waiting.
“At this time, no date has been set for it to be opened,” library spokeswoman Gayle Osterberg said by email.
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On a Related Note…The Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress: Challenges for information practice and information policy (via First Monday)
A 5000 word look at the project.