(*Sorry.)
(**Really, really, so sorry.)
In the summer of 2009, I started tweeting new items that were being added to our Repository. Here’s how I did it:
- I took the address of the RSS feed from our EPrints Repository.
- I created an account on Twitterfeed (www.twitterfeed.com) and fed the RSS feed into it.
- I created a new Twitter account (@eprintslincoln) to receive the feed, and styled it using University of Lincoln corporate green, plus our version of the open access icon.
Now every time an item appears in our RSS feed, it also appears on Twitter (up to an hour later, because of the way I’ve set up Twitterfeed).
Last week, I heard that Huddersfield University had started doing the same thing (though possibly not by the same means). That inspired me to create a Twitter list to include our Repo feed and @hudeprints:
Asking on the UKCoRR mailing list brought another 12 universities in the UK who are also tweeting their new Repository items.
Someone asked on the list if I had a “cunning plan” for linking our Repo to Twitter. Admitting I had no plan, cunning or otherwise, I said that…
I created the account:(a) because I could.(b) because I was new to Twitter and was playing around with RSS feeds and http://twitterfeed.com/(c) to see if anyone would follow the account (17 have, so far).(d) to see if anyone would retweet anything. (Hint: https://twitter.com/#search?q=RT%20%40eprintslincoln = 0)(e) because it was around the time there was a slew of articles proclaiming that RSS feed readers were ‘dead’, and that social media feeds were the way to go.(f) because I thought it might be another way of exposing the Repo data for re-use: certainly I’m intrigued about the possibilities for Twitter et al. as a way of researchers interacting with Repositories.
See also:
- Joss Winn (University of Lincoln)’s experiments using WordPress to similarly ‘socialise’ a Repository feed, here.
- William Nixon (Glasgow University)’s blog posts on the same topic: here and here.
