This is how we do it: @nlnz on Twitter

Oprah's there. Ashton's there. Cats do it, dogs do it, even transportation infrastructure does it. And so do we; tweet away on Twitter.

It's safe to assume that the LibraryTechNZ readership is au fait with Twitter, but just in case; Twitter http://twitter.com is a microblogging service that lets you post 140-character updates to the web. If you want to know why that's useful, even addicitive, check out Tim O'Reilly's post.

Twitter seems to satisfy two strong human needs: our desire to tell people about ourselves, and our desire to know what's going on with the people around us (physically or virtually). When we’re explaining Twitter, we often point to these Personal Items columns in early 20th century newspapers, where small goings-on in the community were printed for all to read.



Libraries and other cultural institutions have taken to Twitter with huge enthusiasm; some do it incredibly well, others are still finding their feet.

We're pretty happy with how our Twitter works. Sure, we're not rockstars; currently, we're verging on 700 followers. But we get some great feedback







And awesome interaction








So, this is how we do it

Chelsea set up the Twitter account last September, to talk to attendees at the LIANZA 2008 conference. However when the conference was over we were left with a communications channel and not enough to communicate. The Library doesn't run enough events or release enough news to sustain a daily Twitter feed. So we had a bit of a think about it, invoking what have become our three favourite "so, you want to start a [insert social media site name here] account?" questions, and this is what we came up with.

What content do you have to share?

Twitter lends itself so well to a pithy comment and a hyperlink that it rapidly became obvious that posting links to items in digital collections such as Papers Past and Manuscripts & Pictorial was a natural use for the @nlnz account.

An advantage of this approach is that there's no need for any clearances – we're taking people through to collection items in their natural habitat, not reproducing the items elsewhere.

Who's going to run this thing?

Answer: Chelsea and Courtney.

We sit next to each other, which makes it really easy to coordinate. We both twitter ourselves, so we've got a grasp of the mechanism. And we're both really interested in the collections; partly, this activity grew out of the fact we've being passing links and comments between us via IM for ages. Occasionally people send us a recommendation for the stream, but so far no-one has wanted to join in as a regular poster.

It was really important to both of us that we had our names on the account, drawing inspiration from Shelley Bernstein at Brooklyn Museum and from this post & discussion on Nina Simon's Museums 2 blog.

To make it easier for ourselves, we made up some rules:

• We post twice a day (that's why they're called #tbreaktweets: we try to time our posts with the Library's traditional morning and afternoon tea times)
• We restrict the tweeting to the #tbreaktweets; we don't do events or systems outages or media releases. Hopefully this means we're predictable, in a good way.
• We try to make sure we're at our desks for 30 minutes after the tweet goes out, in case anyone writes back. If we're not open to conversation, what's the point of being there?
• We follow anyone who follows us (unless they're a bot selling stuff)
  

Who is your audience community?

We knew that the kind of people we already hung out with on Twitter were happy to be momentarily distracted with a worthwhile link. We're those kinds of people ourselves. But honestly, we couldn't have predicted the kind of audience we attracted. Our followers include cultural institutions, friends and acquaintances, art lovers, history lovers, library lovers, information lovers, New Zealand lovers, humour lovers. It's an eclectic mix.

What has evolved over the past 4 months is nothing short of awesome. It was a pleasant surprise to see that our interest in the National Library's digital collections was shared among so many other people. And our sense of humour wasn't lost on them either!

What's great about Twitter, among other social networking sites, is that what appears on the surface to be a cacophony of disparate voices is sometimes just a simple conversation among friends.

Sharing the love

For us, #tbreaktweets is about sharing the love. In that spirit, here are some of our fav NZ culture tweeters:

http://twitter.com/auckland_museum

http://twitter.com/TePapaColOnline

http://twitter.com/nzlive

http://twitter.com/NZHistorydotnet

http://twitter.com/ChchArtGallery

http://twitter.com/te_ara




A joint post by Chelsea Hughes & Courtney Johnston, tbreaktweeters