Over on Museum 2.0, Nina Simon (not Nina Simone — and wouldn’t it be some­thing if this post was sung by her) has a *great* blog post encour­ag­ing muse­ums to get human on their Twit­ter accounts and pro­vide more than just “spammy and dull” tweets. Pretty much every­thing she exhorts muse­ums to do applies to libraries, as well. Actu­ally, it’s great advice for all types of orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing, um, asso­ci­a­tions and the like.

She pro­vides seven broad sug­ges­tions, but here are some spe­cific ideas she pro­poses for “museum Twit­ter ‘radio sta­tions’.” Just think “libraries” instead of “muse­ums” to imag­ine what a great stream your library could offer.

An Open Let­ter to Muse­ums on Twitter

• “Funny things said by visitors.
• Guard feed! (Thanks for the idea, Shelley.)
• Insti­tu­tional super­sti­tions or weird things about the building.
• The imag­ined expe­ri­ences of a famous arti­fact, heav­ily loved inter­ac­tive, or other insti­tu­tional mas­cot (see this Twit­ter feed, which I doubt is writ­ten by AMNH staff).
• Haiku about museum work.
• A daily or weekly fea­ture on a spe­cific topic.
• Jokes, recipes, quotes, and inter­est­ing facts. Do you know why there are naked ladies on the front of ships?
• Weird and sur­pris­ing behind-the-scenes vic­to­ries and chal­lenges. What’s it like to prep an exhi­bi­tion on poop?
• Top­i­cal, provoca­tive questions.”

Do you know of any libraries already doing this type of tweet­ing? There are some good exam­ples listed on the very help­ful Twit­ter­ing Libraries sec­tion of the LIS 5313 wiki, but I need to go through the whole list.

I’m also inter­ested in find­ing asso­ci­a­tions doing this well (I’m plan­ning to go through Lindy Dreyer’s list of asso­ci­a­tions on Twit­ter).