Cataloging Tweets and Other Digital Media – Do or Don't?

So by now you've probably heard that The Library of Congress is going to catalog every Tweet ever published on Twitter as part of its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. There's an easy-to-understand post about the move over on the Twitter blog. What do you think about this? What does it all mean? What's next?

I decided to research the LOCs National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program a bit more.

“The mission of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program is to develop a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations.”

So what does this mean for school libraries? Does this mean that we should really be making a more concerted effort to catalog useful digital resources found on the Web? Yes, we search, find and share useful Web sites with our teachers and students, but should we be cataloging them in our OPACs? Or is it enough that they are more or less “cataloged” in Google's database for others to find them if they have the tools necessary to perform a strong search? Is it enough to “catalog” useful Web sites in our del.icio.us sites so that when a student or teacher needs to find them later, we can pull them up again?

I'm left with many more questions and not enoguh experience to answer them myself. I think that the Internet is so fluid that there's no way to catalog all of the great Web sites out there. I think the best thing we can do as school librarian's is to teach our students the skills to find great digital resources on the Web. Maybe directing them to the LOC's OPAC is the first step.