For Electronic Records Management class, we were asked to read and article about all of Twitter being archived (http://www.slate.com/id/2251429/). When I first heard about this, I thought it was kind of ridiculous but the article, along with the book I am reading for my book review for this class, kind of gave me a new perspective. The whole idea of saving everything seemed very ridiculous and seemed like we would be creating a big unusable junk!
Reading this article makes me think more deeply into how we don't know what will be valuable to researchers of the future. It also makes more sense to leave the sorting to the future generation since the future generation is more likely to have better tools than the current generation. We still do have to do our part in properly saving metadata with the records. Plus, it's true that it's probably impossible to save every bit of data but I think the future generation will have a better solution about that too.
I have to admit that leaving everything upto the future generation definitely sounds irresponsible but even so, better safe than sorry, right? So, if we can afford to save as much as we can, why not? But then there's also the talk about the affordability. While the high unemployment rate doesn't seem to be going down and children have to face worse and worse school conditions due to budget cuts, do we really want to spend the money on saving all the Tweets for the future historians? When I think about the costs, I would rather have my tax money be used on schools and creating more jobs...
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