Twitter and Archives

At our department in Alden Libraries at Ohio University, we have many different collections of images and manuscripts. Some include the E. W. Scripps collection of images and Scripps' manuscripts, the Ohio University Yearbook collection, and other images from Ohio University's long and rich history. After reading the 23 Things article on twitter and micro-blogging (thing 8), I realized that we could actually seriously use micro-blogging to promote our work and other archival collections contained in Alden Library.

This idea isn't new. Previously, when I first started working here at Digital Initiatives, we scanned a diary of a student who came here in the 1800's (the exact time of that student's enrollment escaped me at the moment). My co-worker had the idea of starting a twitter feed of his diary updates, in line with the actual date of his diary entries. The reason we didn't do it, besides being busy with our other important tasks, was that the diary entries didn't cover a full year, and the selection that we were digitizing was only a small 1-2 month slection of his diary.

My proposal is this, instead of just doing diary-type posts, we could do twitter posts that promote individual collections. Along with the small amount of text, we could include the most interesting photo's available in the collection (in the hopes that students and others will go online and visit our other digitized collections). A congruent idea I had was time-related, as we probably should only post/promote one collection per week, along with only posting once a day. This will ensure quality posts along with not annoying those who follow us with constant twitter-feed activity. Also here is another picture from our Scripps collection: