Coming up with good Tweets and FB posts for work can be a challenge at times, especially if one has to pay attention not only to the social media etiquette but also to a federal agency’s social media policy.

The National Transportation Library’s collection includes a wonderful book called “The American Book of Days”, by Jane M. Hatch, and I use it quite often to see if any of those dates are related to transportation issues. I also found out that my birthday, April 10, marks the birthday of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. He was born in 1829 in Nottingham, England (Robin Hood anyone?). 

Today, while hunting for good tweeting and posting material, I came across the web site “This Day in History“, and found out that today, back in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite.

While that is somewhat transportation-related I thought it was more appropriate to leave this topic to NASA and check for something more down to earth.

So, this day in Transportation History, President A. Lincoln observed the first balloon demonstration near Washington, DC (1861) and in 1992 a cargo plane crashed into an apartment building near an airport in Amsterdam, Holland. The first occurrence is obviously a happier event; however, the NTL has an online special collection of historial aircraft accident reports, which are quite interesting. You can find them on the Special Collections page, along with some other interesting resources.

And going back to my tweets and posts: Last week my co-worker and I held a presentation about Federal Libraries and Social Media at the Library of Congress. Our Power Point presentation will be online shortly. We’ve gotten great feedback so far, so I hope that you’ll enjoy the presentation.