Cultural Heritage

I’ve been working on the Cultural Heritage part of the UKOLN Web site for the last couple of years and as part of this I’ve started using some Web 2.0 tools and services – LibraryThing for the Bookshelf, Dipity for demonstrating the uses of blogs, Delicious for the Ariadne Digest, writing for this blog – and now I’ve created an account (ukolnculture) on twitter.

So why did I do this? You’re reading this blog, so I assume you discovered it somehow. Maybe you saw the link on the UKOLN home page or the link in the Cultural Heritage pages? Perhaps someone passed on the URL to you or you heard about it at one of our Web 2.0 events? The thing is that there are lots of ways you could find out about the blog and we don’t know which way it will happen. So we can’t rely on people finding us via route A – we have to make sure you can find us via routes B and C (and may be on as far as route Z) as well.

Why twitter? Well, for three reasons. We know that some people from cultural heritage organisations – our target audience – are already on twitter. We also like to use the Cultural Heritage pages to demomstrate how you could use a service for your organisation. And thirdly, if we are going to suggest you use it, we need to have used it ourselves.

So how did I fare as a newbie twitterer? Sign up is easy – just fill in Full Name, Username, Password and email address. But hold on – it’s worth thinking about this just a little beforehand. Full Name doesn’t have to be your personal name; so if you are creating an account for the museum friends or the library reading groups, then use something like Someplace Museum Friends or Someplace Library Readers (though there’s a little catch here in that you’ve only got 20 characters available so you might need to be a little creative). What about Username? Well this is the bit that twitter followers will see – in our case ukolnculture. As this gets quoted in tweets it’s good to keep this short but do think about how it reads – we decided against ukolnculther. And finally the email address – twitter will use this to contact you to confirm the set up of the account. This doesn’t have to be your personal one (you may be reponsible for the twitter account this year but it could be someone else next year) so you could use a corporate one.

Having got the account – what next? That really depends on what you want to use twitter for. Could be you want to promote events in your library or museum, or a way to let people know of unexpected closures (the recent snow springs to mind). For some things, you might need to write the posts yourself. Not difficult, simply sign in to the account and start typing the message – in 140 characters. You don’t even have to do the counting – twitter shows the character count just above the text box and the number drops as you type, delete text and the count rises. It’s useful to post an initial tweet that simply say something about the pupose of the account, such as ‘Created the someplacemuseum Twitter account for news about our events and exhibitions’.

But there is an alternative and that is using another service to pull text from RSS feeds into your twitter account, which is what we are doing. Maybe you already have a news page or a library blog with an RSS feed set up. Sign up to twitterfeed and put in the URLs of the feeds you want to use and use the twitter link. If you are doing this it’s worth manually adding a second initial tweet saying something along the lines of ‘Created the ukolnculture Twitter account. This will publish various work-related RSS feeds’. But what about that 140 character limit? All that happens is that the RSS feed is automatically truncated by twitter, so typically a tweet will be the title of a blog post and part of the first sentence – just enough to intrigue people enough to go to the blog and read the full post. It follows from this that long titles in blog posts should be avoided.

So what will you find if you follow ukolnculture on twitter? Our policy for this twitter account is to focus on letting people know about our activities for the cultural heritage sector. The tweets will come from three RSS feeds (though we may add further feeds at a later date). The Cultural Heritage blog feed will alert people to new posts on the blog. The events feed will inform people of news about our workshops and other events for the cultural heritage sector. The briefing documents feed will let people know when new Introbytes briefing documents are published.

If you are on twitter why not follow ukolnculture. If you’re not on twitter yet, why not have a think about what it could do for you? And usefully, it’s free.