Tweets at Your Library

It’s been said that quality is more important than quantity, but how far are you willing to push that concept? Back in graduate school, I learned to restrict myself to two pages in what before would have taken four or five. New Web tools are prompting us to condense our message even further. Take Twitter, Jaiku, and other micro-content publishing platforms based on the 140-character limit of SMS (short message system) text messages. That means that this paragraph is about four times over the limit for a Twitter message.

Although micro-writing may seem foreign to some of us, it’s a trend that’s really taken off. According to a survey from CTIA, a wireless communication industry organization, a whopping 158 billion text messages were transmitted in 2006. Figuring that the text messages were, on average, half of the possible 140-character length, we are still looking at the equivalent of almost six million books the size of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Moreover, your students—who hate to write—were likely contributors to the over four billion pages worth of micro-content last year. And that was probably using the impossibly small keypads on their mobile phones. From this new perspective, let us now consider the potential for micro-content when it is being produced on a full-size keyboard. What can actually be said in 140 characters? I can summarize this column in only 128: “Micro-content is a new form of writing that captures and transmits the essence of ideas in short, rapid bursts of information.”

While not every message on Twitter is as carefully constructed, there are many examples of this new style being employed to quickly and easily spread information. BBC News has a Twitter feed that publishes short headlines throughout the day. “The US opens a new military command centre for Africa it says will help poor states without launching wars,” the BBC tweeted in early October. The Los Angeles Fire Department uses Twitter to update readers about calls to which they are responding. Author and blogger Debra Hamel found another source for micro-content: twice daily, she tweets the first line of a book. You can follow along at twitterlit.com, or the once daily children’s version at kidderlit.com. Librarians attending conferences are using tweets to capture the essence of presentations. Conference Twitter feeds can provide a platform for more in-depth reflection at a later time. Don’t have time to write a regular library blog but want to stay connected with your community? What about using micro-content to send out short daily messages about program highlights, new resources or book recommendations. Here are some examples:

• “The new Meg Cabot is here! While waiting, grab something from our Cabot Countdown shelf of books that you’re sure to enjoy.”
• “Classes first, third, and eighth period. The library is open, but remember to respect the work taking place. See you (but not hear you).”
• “Just finished reading the third book in Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice series. Will and Evanlyn are Skandian captives. Can Halt save them?”

Short and sweet. One of the real beauties of micro-content publishing is that the platform was designed from the beginning to accommodate multiple formats. You can follow Twitter feeds on your phone, on the Twitter site, via RSS in your favorite feed reader, or even via email. This means that if you took two minutes a day to write 140 characters of a booktalk, that micro-review could reach a wide audience of readers. Micro-content is also an ideal way to invite students to contribute their voices to the library’s online presence. They tend to be comfortable with the idea of a short text message, and let’s be honest, 140 characters means much less to read and approve if you have prepublication moderation. So what is the takeaway from this? “Micro-content provides a platform for short bursts of intense communication that can build a library community—140 characters at a time.” (And that’s with two characters to spare!)