The John Muir Web 2.0 project

[Sherri Berger]

Hello all,

Wanted to let you know about a fun project we are launching at Calisphere, the University of California's public website of primary sources and archival materials.

Starting December 1, for a week we will be quoting portions of the letters of renowned California naturalist, explorer, writer, and conservationist John Muir (1838-1914) on our Twitter and Facebook accounts. Each update/tweet will contain a segment of Muir’s compelling prose and a link to the original document and transcript.

With this project we are aiming to engage students, educators, and the public with the recent online publication of more than 6,500 of Muir's letters—a joint achievement of The Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley and the University of the Pacific Library.

I hope you'll consider following or becoming a fan, and please let me know what you think! I welcome your feedback and your ideas on using these tools to engage users. Is anyone working on anything similar?

-Sherri

Where it's at:
www.twitter.com/calisphere
www.facebook.com/calisphere

[Christian van der Ven]

I am "following" you from now on! :-)

Also I am most curious to your experiences with this project, and the level of succes it will have (in terms of new followers/fans, clicks leading towards the original documents, engagement etcetera). So please keep us posted!

Your Twitter account already seems very (inter)active!

[Sherri Berger]

Thanks, Christian!

I'll definitely report on how this goes. So far I can say that one unexpected and great outcome has been that in talking about the event, we have simply been able to remind users we haven't been in touch with for a while about our site. Even if the event itself is not widely "attended" (retweeted?), we've already gotten requests to contribute to newsletters and journals showcasing all the great resources on Calisphere. So that's one success so far! I would encourage others interested in promoting their collections via social networks to consider something like this to jump start their effort.

more to come...