China's National Library is joining hands with Sina Weibo, the popular Twitter-like platform to archive social media posts. The library plans to save around 200 billion posts from Weibo's hundreds of millions of users, for what it calls research and policy-making purposes. But there are also privacy concerns. CGTN reporter Wang Mengzhen has more.

Digital revolution goes to the National Library of China. It is reshaping its Internet archiving strategy and China's social media giant Sina was chosen as its first commercial partner in late April.

LIAO YONGXIA, DEPUTY DIRECTOR COORDINATION & OPERATION MANAGEMENT DIVISION NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CHINA "We have already had our own web archiving center in 2009 to gather information in government and news portals in the past decade. Sina, especially its microblogging platform Weibo, has been a key online channel for the public to express themselves. So this could be a strong supplement to our existing collections."

All of the more than 200 billion public posts, as well as huge amounts of pictures, vlogs and even comments from Weibo's over 400 million active users will be archived gradually for non-commercial purposes. For academics, it's a rich mine.

ZHOU KUI, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR COMMUNICATION UNIVERSITY OF CHINA "It's not only the content, but the emotion matter and the social connection also matters."

Back in 2010, the U.S Library of Congress initiated a similar program with Twitter, but faced with a massive number of tweets, the library had to take a step back by only saving selected posts. Liao says their project could be different.

LIAO YONGXIA, DEPUTY DIRECTOR COORDINATION & OPERATION MANAGEMENT DIVISION NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CHINA "We will first store all archives on the servers of Sina. Then the national library will join Sina to select certain useful data, but we haven't' decided the selection criteria yet. As for the access, we would like to first serve certain researchers and then expand to more, step by step, we hope to reach out to the public ultimately."

So, are Weibo users really buying the idea? The project became a trending topic on Weibo, soon after its announcement late last month. Many welcomed it and even joked about how later generations would view their slangs. But the reactions are mixed.

"I will be so excited if my posts are selected as a future research subject. Why not? It becomes part of history."

"I would like to share some of my posts with the national library, but for some other posts related to my personal feelings, I would rather not do so."

But experts say the sharing of data is part of the deal when you sign up.

ZHOU KUI, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR COMMUNICATION UNIVERSITY OF CHINA "Before you start to use social media like Weibo, you need to agree with its term of service including."

WANG MENGZHEN BEIJING "The staff at the national library also say some of the archived Weibo posts will be shared with the public later this year as a first step. So you will soon find out what the valuables are for researchers. Wang Mengzhen CGTN Beijing."