the institution announced it will no longer archive every one of our status updates, opinion threads, and “big if true“s. As of Jan. 1, the library will only acquire tweets “on a very selective basis.”

The library doesn’t say how many tweets it has in its collection now, but in 2013, it said it had already amassed 170 billion tweets, at a rate of half a billion tweets a day.

Tweets can now be longer, too: This fall, Twitter rolled out 280-character tweets to most users across the platform.

Another issue: Twitter only gives the library the text of tweets – not images, videos, or linked content. “Tweets now are often more visual than textual, limiting the value of text-only collecting,” the library says.

The library also has to figure out how to effectively manage deleted tweets, whicharen’t part of the archive.