The highlights from Jared Polis' decade in the U.S. House of Representatives were downloaded onto a 120-gigabyte flash drive this month and delivered to the University of Colorado Boulder.
Archivists at the school are very excited about the gift.
"This is the first time we will have worked with a political collection that includes archived social media," said Megan Friedel, who manages CU Boulder's archives.
It's also the first time the university has scored a political archive that is primarily electronic. Previous collections at the university, including the congressional papers from former U.S. Senator Ken Salazar, took up hundreds of linear feet of storage space.
Friedel said Polis' records came in on the flash drive and just a handful of boxes containing papers.
She said future Coloradans will be able to study how Polis became a pioneer at using social media in office. Every Tweet, Instagram post and Facebook comment Polis made as a congressman will be preserved in the new collection.
"The fun thing about the social media accounts is it really captures Jared Polis' relationship with his constituents," Friedel said. "It's a really fantastic record of very current ways the public can interact with politicians in office."
Polis' congressional archives will also include his daily briefings, notes and other correspondence with constituents.
Some of the collection, including the archived social media posts, will be made public in the coming weeks, but other files will stay under lock and key until the year 2050.That's because it's common for elected officials who are still in office to get a 30-year embargo period placed on their archives.
