The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
I am curious to hear about as many different kinds of uses libraries are finding for Twitter, ideally with links to some exemplars for different kinds of uses. I've seen libraries using Twitter for outreach, to answer reference questions, to notify existing patrons of events, but I would be interested to know more broadly what kinds of categories of use libraries are finding for Twitter.
As a side question, if there are any guides of publications on the effectiveness of different uses of Twitter by libraries I would be interested in that information as well.
Trevor Owens
I'll point to two local examples:
See also Emily Lloyd's observations on public-library Twitter accounts.
I think there may be fun experiments to use Twitter as a communication mechanism for automated processes in libraries, digital repositories, etc.
For example I wrote paperbot as an experiment to use the Chronicling America API to announce headlines from 100 years ago today on Twitter as the paperbot user. It also will announce when new batches of historic newspaper data have been loaded like this. The OCR is kind of messy, so the low follower count reflects how interesting this really is :-)
Another perhaps more radical example perhaps was Harvard's LibraryLab that had a project to announced circulation statistics in realtime on Twitter using a bot. But I think it got shutdown because of privacy concerns. I imagine it might've been fairly easy to get rate limited by Twitter if the circulation traffic was high. I'm having trouble finding references to this project on the Web right now for some reason.
The idea of giftcasting seems like it might have some application in the library/archives space, but I'm still trying to connect those dots :-)
I think it also might be interesting to monitor who tweets about your stuff, by using the Twitter API to monitor when someone posts a link to a website property you manage. As a proof of concept I created an app that did this for Wikipedia called wikitweets, which turned out to be mildly entertaining. I think it could potentially be a good way of seeing how various groups of people use your content.
I work in a high school library and am not currently using twitter but have thought about it. The most obvious use is to publicize speakers and or programs that we have going on. The other option we are considering is just a way of letting sutdents know when hot books have come back to the library. In other words something like catching fire has been returned. We are considering that but have issues with sutdents using twitter in school to follow us.
@msulibraries tweets various things. The bulk of the content is from the RSS feeds (flickr, youtube, library news, information from branch libraries, and soon to be blurbs from our Information Literacy unit.) We also have mutual understanding with several campus units to support each other by tweeting institution-related cultural events. And there are tweets from the staff interacting with the followers as well about anything that might interest the community.
We tweet upcoming events and items of interest but the way we use Twitter differently than HTML/RSS is to spark conversations. It's not the only goal but it's a big one.
Since our twitter account is (wo)manned by several people using a management tool and we do have back-and-forth discussion via twitter we're considering 'signing' tweets. -- Patrons have begun to ask who they're talking to.
Not sure if we will decide to do it but one idea is to use initials (-sk) in tweets and to periodically retweet a link to a profiles page.
We tweet about our events, hours, when a new video from an event is posted online, do #fridayreads, and #FF. Though recently someone has started to harass us, but that's not here or there...
I'm actually currently doing a study with a colleague of mine about the effectiveness of twitter in academic libraries in the U.S. Keep your eyes peeled for an article in the coming year.
Like other people, we use Twitter to promote events, but I wanted to repeat this because we're using TwitterFeed to automatically pull events from our calendar RSS feed and send them to Twitter a few days before the event. We also use the same tool to automatically pull our blog posts too.
Also, we have a second twitter feed to easily put announcements on our homepage (more info). Instead of having to log into our webserver and manually update the homepage, which can be difficult if we close unexpectedly due to a storm or power outage or something, this second Twitter account lets us easily update the homepage from home.
@diglib411 We provide information about digital preservation history and issues. We see it as an extension of our in-house services and a way to connect with the public about digital preservation and disaster readiness.
Besides what others have mentioned such as autopulling in tweets from rss, facebook postings etc, we also spend a lot of time on real-time scans of tweets that relate to library (whether the user is following the account) and answer if appropriate.
This can sometimes delight the user who isn't expecting an answer but equally can scare off users.
We have being doing this for 2 years now and have a learnt a lot from trial and error on the type of the tweets one should respond to, and which ones we shouldn't.