Seattle Public Library on Twitter

Image courtesy of Digital Curation Blog.

Two weeks into the new year, Seattle Public Library (SPL) is proving it's changing with the times. Last week, it was announced that SPL is offering free mp3 downloads to library card holders through Freegal. This week, SPL announced that it is now on Twitter @SPLBuzz

While SPL's Facebook page has been around long enough to garner over 9,700 fans, their new Twitter page has gathered about 300 followers in the five days of its existence. Perhaps the most interesting part of this announcement is that SPLBuzz only tweets on behalf of the central downtown Seattle branch, and they are among the last libraries in the state and across the nation to finally launch a Twitter account. Across the state, Shoreline Community College Library (@SCClibrary) has been on Twitter since September 2009, and Tacoma Public Library (@TacomaLibrary) has been tweeting since August 2009. Even the UW Library (@uwlibraries) has had Twitter since 2009. Nationwide, Library of Congress (@librarycongress) in the other Washington is king of the crop with over 144,400 followers. This library got some press last spring when it was announced that every public tweet ever since Twitter's inception in March 2006 would be digitally archived at the Library of Congress.

So what can one expect our local library to tweet about? Expect promotion of upcoming events and hopefully Twitpics or other streaming media coverage as the event takes place to draw an audience. There will also likely be heavy promotion of the library's new online resources (ie. Freegal), some of which don't even require a library visit. Above all, we hope SPL gets the most out of Twitter by honing in on its greatest benefit of interacting with its followers by prompting discussions, retweeting relevant information, and drawing from breaking news to relate it to library resources.

For more interesting ideas on how libraries should be using Twitter, check out this article. Also, click here for a list of other nationwide libraries you can find on Twitter.