If you'd forgotten your drunken or embarassing tweets from 2010, bad news: the Library of Congress is reportedly weeks away from finishing their project to archive the roughly 170 billion tweets sent between Twitter's founding in 2006 and April 2010, when the initiative was announced. Why are they archiving your tweets? All in the name of science and research.

Twitter is a new kind of collection for the Library of Congress, but an important one to its mission of serving both Congress and the public. As society turns to social media as a primary method of communication and creative expression, social media is supplementing and in some cases supplanting letters, journals, serial publications and other sources routinely collected by research libraries.

Archiving and preserving outlets such as Twitter will enable future researchers access to a fuller picture of today's cultural norms, dialogue, trends and events to inform scholarship, the legislative process, new works of authorship, education and other purposes.

Only public tweets that were published six months ago or longer will be included in the library, which has so far received over 400 requests for information from researchers around the world.