Libraries and Twitter - should we? Will you follow?

I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand. Why shells existed on the tops of mountains. How the various circles of water form around the spot which has been struck by a stone, and why a bird sustains itself in the air.

Leonardo da Vinci
(artist, architect, musician and scientist), 1452-1519

Time is the one thing we all seem to be short of, yet here we are still exploring the ever-expanding cyberworld. Where will it all end? This exercise has thrown up some nice library twitter pages, with quite a variety of styles. Most tweets appear to be being posted by often only 1 or 2 librarians at each institution, and there didn't seem to be a lot of interaction on many of the ones I looked at. Most content seemed to be promoting library events or resources - always a good thing - and I really liked the tweets on the College of Du Page, Glen Ellyn (Illinois) "LibrarySecrets" page, and they have a good following, so it looks as though a lot of other people like them as well. Rodney Libraries has a chatty style and a mix of library and 'newsy' tweets, but at least the language is clear. Nathaniel Hawthorne said "Easy reading is damn hard writing", and with only 140 characters available for a tweet, good skills in the art of writing must surely be a real asset?

If NSL were twittering, a tweet about the Northcote Maori Collection could look something like this - "Mā te huruhuru te manu ka rere ai / With feathers a bird can fly". Come and meet Manu Aute and browse her treasures.