I work for the Berkeley Public Library in the Adult and Family Literacy Program, Berkeley READS. As I walked around the library today I noticed multiple signs for events and meetings. Most, but not all are listed on the library calendar on the library website. If the library had a Twitter account all of the events could be sent out into the community and more people would know about them. Naturally, other libraries could see what we were doing and vice- versa.
Berkeley READS has its own set of events and these are not usually published on the main library calendar. If you want to know what is going on in Berkeley READS you have to come to the office, telephone us, email us, or find the updated material for events in the classrooms at Central or the West Branch. One event that is going on tonight at the West Branch is a Writer to Writer workshop. This workshop is a helpful tool for beginning writers who are planning to enter the CLA sponsored event. Having it posted on Twitter could be useful for all.
I had one concern about having Twitter in the library. Who would Tweet? Would all librarians Tweet? Staff? Admin? The Director? The Foundation? I think it would be best if the community participated, but there would have to be some rules. Or maybe there would be someone to run the Tweets by.
I think it would be a good idea if the library were to have a blog and have the posts automatically feed into Twitter via twitterfeed, as Ellyssa does with her blog. This could be a selling point as the library would not have to do extra work to get the word (or Tweet) out.
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I definitely agree that using Twitterfeed to automatically feed a library's blog into their Twitter account is a great way to both market the library and its blog as well as to get the information provided in the blog out to patrons, who may not necessarily consistently check the library's blog, but probably daily check their Twitter accounts. This seems like the best way to reach out to a certain group of technology-friendly library patrons, and seems like it would be more effective than only having a blog that patrons would have to navigate to in order to read. This way, if something interests the patrons that they see on the library's Twitter feed, they can follow the link to the library's blog to find out more.
I also really like the idea of linking the library's catalog to its Twitter account so that the author and title of new books are automatically posted as Tweets with links to the catalog for easy access to the items.
It does seem like there are a lot of methods for using RSS technology to automatically post Tweets (like the two above), which you are right, would mean that having a Twitter account may not necessarily mean more work.
Erin