I'm doing my Master's at the moment and one of our assignments this week has been to blog about two social media tools that we'd like to use in our Library. Here are my thoughts on Pinterest:
I have, for a while, been interested in the potential of Pinterest as a social networking tool for
academic libraries. A fairly new platform (it was started as an invitation-only
site in 2010), CNN reported
last year that it was the third most visited site in the US. Briefly,
Pinterest is an online board onto which users can “pin” interesting images
and/or links.
There are various ways that academic libraries can use this
tool. It has visual appeal and lends itself to activities such as advertising
new books by pinning images of book covers, as well as announcing events in the
Library by pinning images of posters.
The potential use of Pinterest that most interests me
though, is that of creating a historical image collection. Many academic
libraries these days have digital repositories where they curate and collate
their digital Special Collections. Pinterest allows one to create an online
collection of historical images outside of this repository. The benefit of this
would be that information such as this is pushed out to Library patrons, where
they are and using the tools with which they are familiar.
See, for example, what Southwestern University
in Texas is doing with their Pinterest Board to promote Special Collections.
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