Are we cool or what?

I have a paper due in a couple of weeks about good or bad websites for a library – comparing them, seeing how they meet needs – all of that stuff. However in searching for a cool world of libraries for patrons I’m having a hell of a lot of difficulty trying to imagine a world where anybody other than a librarian or library user or library student on a mission would care about a library presence on twitter. Nope. Can't do it. It's not that we don't use libraries. We, meaning generic me and everyone like me just don't care.
Librarians among other librarians can have this very cool look. They’re funny, insidious, interesting and just very very cool. We don’t know it yet, but there you are – look at the myspace example Birmingham Public Libraries, or Ann Arbor District Library and you’ll find cool all over the place. And check out blogs or tweets by The Librarian in Black , Ann Arbor District Library AXIS Blog, the shiftedlibrarian.com, and information wants to be free @ meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/. If we build our presence online it shows how cool, sexy, funny we can be and it’s real attractive. The problem is no one else will come. Let’s face it, no one cares. We have our image as the place to get books and look for information, but no one seems to get that we are these cool information professionals in this cool professional place. Oh granted there will be a few, hooked in by catalogs (which are I must say generally boring. Come on, you know it. A great web page stands out for one reason: it shines against the dullness of the background.) Now I don’t blame the us for that. Show me a brick building with a few thousand books and I’ll wax nostalgic with the best of them. But we’re trading on nostalgia here and that’s not always a good thing..
So how would we mix our two images? There is that brick building and then there are those ultra cool things that we can do: information games, twittering up hot meetings, dragging apart books with the public, providing free access to music and books and even cooler, arguing fiercely about our rights to privacy in this homeland world. Which is funny in sort of a disparate way.
So yes we need to build our image on facebook. But we need to find a way to make the mountain come to Mohamed. We can certainly start with the inhouse fans, although in my public branch, a great many of them are afraid of the new, techy, and quirky. But if we got this image thing going, maybe we’d get them to see that they’d be at the forefront of the new movement – you know, the I was doing the library thing before it became cool. Granted there are cool things to be other than cool.Did I really just say that? Well there are. But we need to build our online presence and the first thing we need to show is our ultra cool presence and then send out cookie crumbs to bring in the cookies. More on this later. I have to go bake some cookies...
In the meantime