WebJunction

Tweet. Tweet.

That's the sound of Missouri River Regional Library (MRRL) twittering with their community.

Located in Central Missouri with a population of 86,242, MRRL serves Cole and Osage Counties with a collection of more than 236,000 items. The main library, located in Jefferson City (the Missouri State Capital), is a 38,525 square foot facility that offers a diverse collection of books and multimedia items for children, teens and adults. Currently there are more than 53,000 MRRL card holders. In 2006, more than 667,000 items were circulated; MRRL’s Public Computer Center averages more than 60,000 patron logins per year.

A 4,600 square foot branch is located in Linn, Missouri. A new state-of-the-art 40-foot bookmobile holds more than 4,000 items and makes 40 stops each month. Programs for children, teens and adults are offered throughout the year. Included in the 350 programs offered are book/film series, craft/hobby classes, story times, Capital READ (annual community read), the Mid-Missouri Storytelling Festival, the Annual MRRL Renaissance Festival, and Cultural Concerts at the Capitol.

How does MRRL keep the community informed of these various goings-on? In addition to the long-standing forms of outreach and the newer social networking trends (Flickr, MySpace, YouTube), the library has recently been experimenting with Twitter, the micro-blogging application that is taking the Web 2.0-savvy world by storm. This free online messaging tool allows users to post short (140-character) updates on what they are doing at that moment. In Twitter lingo, posting is called twittering and the posts themselves are tweets.

Librarian Robin Hastings uses this platform to broadcast links to the library’s information already published on the Web, such as Flickr pictures, upcoming events (via upcoming.org), bookmobile status, and press releases. Twitter users can subscribe to the MRRL account and access this information either via the Web or through text messaging on their cell phone. As the library incorporates new blogs and other new sources of information, the information will be pulled into the MRRL Twitter account, so it will be automatically available to subscribers. Once they have several sources of information going, they will split the Twitter feeds into more manageable chunks; for example, they may put new events and bookmobile status updates in one account, teen information and materials in another, and press releases and official library news feeds into a third account.

Easy to Set-up, Easy to Maintain.

So far, MRRL has found this form of outreach to be fairly painless and quite exciting for users. They use Twitterfeed, a separate application that allows them to pull RSS feeds from the library and post them to Twitter. This makes the Twitter information stream almost hassle-free. As information is published via RSS from the normal channels, it is automatically grabbed and posted to Twitter. MRRL also placed a "Twitter badge" on the library's MySpace profile, so that the information they are pushing out has another way to be seen. Twitter badges are small pieces of code that can be added to a website to show the latest tweet. The library will be adding Twitter feeds to their web pages on their website as well. And as an added time-saver, MRRL has found this to be a great way to publish information once and use it multiple times in multiple ways!

Follow the Experiment.

The library has not yet advertised this service to patrons, but there are already a few local library (and library lover) "followers" who have found the account through Robin’s twittering and through various posts Robin has made in WebJunction’s Emerging Technologies and the Web forum. Once the Library has a good handle on the kinds of information that will be included in each Twitter feed, they will post it to MRRL’s website and let people know how they can follow the library —and the information it provides—through Twitter. Until then, they are experimenting with the service and playing with different ways to use it to get the good word out about the Library and the various services it offers. 

If you would like to follow along with MRRL’s experiment, get yourself a Twitter account and subscribe to tweets from Missouri River Regional Library and Webgoddess Robin Hastings.