Incessant chatting is finally being tolerated at the Library of Congress, but it's not the type of talk that'll make you throw dirty glances and relocate ten times. With the launch of its official Twitter feed last month, the LOC is going a little OC.
So why does the largest library in the world need to use a text and blurb-driven social networking technology like Twitter? With Twittermania sweeping the country, the folks at LOC want to do what everyone else is doing: get more information out to the public, faster.
"Twitter is a way to get fast, engaging information out to some of our most ardent audiences in a personal way," said the Library's Director of Communications, Matt Raymond. "It's another way to be transparent and accountable to those people who pay the taxes that allow Congress to continue supporting us."
Already displaying over 118 updates and recruiting an impressive early following of 2,400 Twitterers listening in on every typed word, the launch of the LOC's Twitter experiment seems a success. But who are these people following the library's "tweets?" A quick look at the list of followers shows librarians, a Congressional Quarterly researcher, journalists, a nightlife website owner, poets, book hounds, museum workers, and book store owners, among many other unidentified individuals.
Curious what a tweet looks like? Here are a few snippets from the LOC Twitter page.
"College students: Want to be a treasure hunter this summer? Check this out."
"O Captain! My Captain! is probably the most famous poem about Lincoln but the 16th prez inspired FAR more verse than that."
"Gitmo lecture and first Lincoln gallery talk among tomorrow's events."
Hooked yet? If not, maybe you can investigate the LOC on another social networking site, one centered around photo sharing. A recent pilot project with Flickr.com resulted in a highly popular collaboration called the ‘The Commons,' where 21 museums, libraries, and universities from across the country and the world upload copyright-free images to share with Internet surfers. Appropriate to it's name, The Commons aims at getting people involved in the historical process by leaving comments and tags as to the details of the photo, some dating back to Abraham Lincoln's oldest-recorded pictures in 1847.
After the pilot project between Flickr and the Library of Congress went digital in 2007, and more than 3.6 million people logged on to tap into the vast reserves of the Library's 14 million image database, 3,000 of which were initially posted on Flickr, 20 more cultural heritage institutions jumped on the Flickr bandwagon to increase awareness about their image databases.
"The Library was the first participating institution, and we're delighted that so many others have followed and are sharing wonderful copyright-free photographs form institutions that are stewards of images," Raymond said.
From gaining Thomas Jefferson's 6,000-strong book collection in 1815, to launching a National Digital Library in 1990, to housing more than 142 million items in its three Capitol Hill buildings, to extending it's reach to Flickr, it seem as though the Library of Congress, which it marked its 209th birthday this year, is keeping up with the times. Using new technologies, the LOC can reach millions more people that don't live or have a chance to visit its collection in Washington, DC.
"Given that about 1.6 million people visit the Library every year onsite, but tens of millions every year use our Web site, the advantages are clear," said Raymond. "We have free, authentic, authoritative content, and it is our mission to make that content broadly accessible."
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