Let's get physical ....

I've always disliked the word 'virtual' in relation to the web - virtual tours, virtual lives. The word either creates a false similarity, or a false distinction.

One of the things that's interested me over the last year or so is the blurring distinction between 'online' and 'physical'. You see it in Flickr meet-ups; Derek Powazek and Heather Champ talked about it in their Webstock workshop earlier this year; Brooklyn Museum's 1st Fans membership is designed for people who fit into the Venn diagram of attending Target First Saturdays at the Museum and following the Museum online. I have a dream inside my head where in a few years volunteers can come into the redeveloped National Library in Wellington and hang out in the volunteer lounge, cleaning up our metadata and OCRd newspapers and drinking our (hopefully improved by them) staff coffee.*

Recently, the Library's Twitter account has made the jump into the physical world - namely print publication. One of the good people at Unlimited saw our @nlnz stream and got in touch to see if some of the digitised items we were posting could be featured in the magazine. Chelsea and I did a sweep of Manuscripts and Pictorial, looking for images Unlimited might find interesting - pictures relating to advertising, the economy, finance, business.

The first tweet-related image appeared in the latest issue: Mr E.D. Vallence burning excess sterling banknotes after the introduction of decimalisation rendered them redundant. We provide the image, and this time it's Unlimited that scribes the caption.


There will be an image per issue over the coming year - 6 images in all. Chelsea and I are pretty stoked about this new way of spreading our enjoyment in the collections; it's a nice change to have 'the media' come to you, instead of hunting journalists down and trying to interest them in your wares. It feels like a really good fit, and we're pleased that it came out of someone seeing and enjoying what we were doing online. If by any chance you're interested in doing something similar, get in touch!

You can see the photo reproduced in Unlimited on Manuscripts + Pictorial, and read more about how we run our Twitter account in this blog post.

*It should be noted that this is just one of my nutbar ideas, and not part of existing plans for the Library redevelopment.