Pinterest for Special Collections

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.

You need to dress professionally

I attended a presentation recently where the audience - predominantly academic librarians - was told the following:

"You need to dress professionally. Just because the students are in jeans and trainers doesn't mean that you should be."

I'm not sure why, but this opinion irks me. And yes, I think it is an opinion, rather than a fact. Dressing "professionally" does not make me a better librarian. Conversely, wearing jeans doesn't make me a bad one either.

I posed the question of professional dress on Facebook and got some interesting responses. Some are adamant that the way we dress affects the way people treat us. I think there is a fundamental flaw here: we accept that people should judge each other by appearances. I think we shouldn't.

One responder said: "Your argument is flawed. It is not the other person's responsibility to get to know you first and then judge you for who you are. The fact is you are already saying who you are by dressing sloppily. Dress for the occasion/situation and you will be judged by who you are. If you want to be taken seriously then dress seriously!"

Here is where the disconnect happens: casual attire = sloppy = inefficient/bad at your job; professional attire = neat = good at your job. I don't think this is necessarily so. Is casual attire always sloppy? What exactly is "casual" attire?

To me, the most interesting response was the following: "Define 'professional'. It is not a universal definition, it is very contextual. Also, quite outdated. The 'professional' attire is clothing that you *need* to perform your specific profession. Uniform / lab coat / safety goggles whatever."

I hadn't thought of it like this. What do I need to wear to be able to carry out my job as an academic librarian? Certainly not safety goggles. Heels? Would a tailored suit help me to do my job better?

What do you think?

Librarians are partners in research. Discuss.

There's a lot of talk these days that academic librarians should be partners in the research process with academics and students. How this is carried out differs from institution to institution, but it can include things like helping with reference management and citation, finding appropriate journals in which to publish and assisting with the writing and/or formatting process. My question during a presentation this morning was: are academics and students on board with this? Do they accept this new role of librarians? Do they see them as more than just people behind a desk who can help them find a particular reference? The answer from the podium was that it differs from department to department. Some are more accepting than others. I'm not sure. What do you think?

On to-do lists and organisation

Said I was going to post every day this month. Uhm, that's been going well, hasn't it?

I've been thinking lately about prioritising work. Most libraries are short-staffed, so we're all doing more than, in an ideal world, we should. But how do we get the most of out of our days while at the same time delivering a good service to our patrons?

My (seemingly endless) daily to-do list goes something like this:

- Prepare work for student assistants - ensure they have enough to get on with for at least an hour or two without bothering me.
- Check to-do list for really urgent stuff that can't wait and deal with those.
- Check email for ditto.
- Quality check stuff that students and staff members have done the day before.
- Create derivatives of stuff they've done and package and send to requester.
- Upload yesterday's theses to digital repository and email requester with link.
- Prepare new projects for students and staff by deciding on file names, creating digital folders, deciding on metadata fields and metadata to be used.

Other stuff I do includes being on the marketing team and the work that that entails, dealing with issues to do with the digital repository, like display problems or downtime, maintaining twitter accounts for various depts.

Ok, there's more, but I've lost the will to list it all.

To keep on top of things, I maintain a to-do list on an Excel spreadsheet that I open at the start of the day and keep checking throughout the day. I also change the status of particular emails that I can't deal with right away to "follow-up" and check those regularly.

How do you arrange your working days so that you don't get behind on important stuff?

Library signs

We've been putting up a lot of signs in our library lately. Signage isn't a simple thing: you have to get your message across, make it succinct enough so that students actually read it, and interesting enough for the sign to catch their attention. You also don't want to put them off with too many prohibitions.

Which is why I love this sign from Oak Park Public Library.

Time to start blogging again

When I saw this post by Kathryn at Librarians Matter, it inspired me to start blogging again. The challenge is to blog every day of June. Lots of work, but also a good way to revive this blog.

For my first post, I'll point you to my institution's digital repository. We've been working very very very (did I mention very?) hard at uploading content to it since last year. We now have over 2000 objects from our visual archives and Special Collections division and over 1000 theses, dating back to 2008. At the moment, the layout is a bit messy, but the platform hasn't been officially launched yet and I'm in the process of sorting it out with the helpful chaps at Ex Libris.

Have a look and let me know what you think.

Twitter 101 for librarians

I gave a presentation this week to library staff about Twitter, explaining what it is, who uses it and why they use it, and how to get started.

I believe Twitter can be a powerful Library marketing tool. It's just one of the many ways we can push information out to our students.

Here are the slides from the presentation:

Twitter for Librarians

View more presentations from neen01.