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.

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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.

The archive’s fate is yet another example of the difficulty of safeguarding the historical records of an era when people communicate using easily deletable emails, websites that can be taken down in seconds and transient tweets, Vines and Snaps. But the library’s critics also see it as a cautionary tale from the 28-year tenure of retiring Librarian of Congress James Billington.

During Billington’s time in office, say critics, the library has espoused grand technological ambitions but didn’t back them up with the planning, budget or nuts-and-bolts needed to turn them from buzzy news releases to tangible accomplishments. It has also repeatedly faced criticism for its management of the U.S. Copyright Office, which has been drawn into numerous controversies on issues involving software, cellphones and online music streaming.

“Billington did many wonderful things, but understanding technology isn’t one of them,” said Silicon Valley Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren. His retirement, set for January, has set off a debate over how the organization can establish itself as a library for the modern era, from better digitizing its book collection to making the Copyright Office’s records more searchable.

A spokesperson said Billington was not available for comment. But in response to deeply critical Government Accountability Office report in March about the library’s tech shortcomings, he said he was taking steps to “fully realize the possibilities of the digital era,” including plans to hire a chief information officer by September; the library has not had a permanent CIO since 2012.

Osterberg said the library is still making progress on the tweet archive — officially known as the Twitter Research Access project.

“The Library has been working to index the collection and develop use policies,” while having to balance “the size and dynamic nature of the Twitter platform” and “the resource realities of a public institution,” she said.

The library has also put together what it calls the Twitter Access Group, charged with opening up the archive sooner rather than later. Osterberg said the team includes “experts in technology, research, legal and library science from around the Library.”

The project is a formidable challenge. For one thing, the library must vacuum up and store a static archive of tweets from Twitter’s start in 2006 to the signing of the agreement — some 20 billion tweets. It must also take in regular updates that number around 400 million tweets a day. And then the library must figure out how to index the tweets and make them searchable by the “bona fide researchers” allowed to have access to them in the library’s reading rooms.

Federal inspectors have complained about the lack of information on how the project is going. The GAO report on the library’s technology failings said the library couldn’t share details on the archive’s cost or development schedule.

The library is lagging behind even its own informal public timetable for the project: In March 2013, Deputy Librarian Robert Dizard Jr. told House appropriators that when it comes to the tweet archive, “we hope to make that available for initial research in June.” That targeted launch date came and went more than a year ago.

Twitter has also declined to comment on the archive’s progress, despite the enthusiasm that company co-founder Biz Stone expressed in a 2010 blog post in which he wrote: “It’s very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history.” The arrangement has always been framed as a gift from the social media company to government archivists, with Twitter leaving it to the library to figure out how to manage the archive.

While some have accused the library of wasting time and money on preserving social media ephemera, the institution has argued that the huge stash of tweets could provide future generations an invaluable real-time record of how humans in the 21st century communicate.

“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,” Osterberg wrote in a short 2013 white paper that was the last major update on the state of the tweet collection.

The terms of the agreement — signed by Billington and then-Twitter General Counsel Alexander Macgillivray, who now serves as a deputy chief technology officer of the United States — required researchers to promise not to use the tweet data for commercial purposes. That’s to avoid interference with Twitter’s business of selling portions of its tweet archive to companies that want, for example, to see how people are tweeting about their products in comparison with competitors.

But even purely academic research is on hold.

In 2014, German information scientist Katrin Weller was named one of the first two digital studies fellows by the John W. Kluge Center, a wing of the library dedicated to using the institution’s collections for study. Weller’s fellowship was supposed to center on parsing the Twitter collection for insight into historical events, from elections to natural disasters. But before leaving for D.C., she says, she learned she would need to shift the focus of her project.

Now, writes Weller in an email while wrapping up her stint at the Library of Congress, “I am studying whether social media data will become an important source of historians in the future, and what has to be done now in order to preserve this kind of data.”