These are posts that show LeMasney Consulting’s experiences with contemporary technology, services, innovations and computers of many kinds.
I love when retro ideas are mashed up with contemporary trends, and so I decided to make this retro style diner sign about ten-dollar all-you-can-eat sushi. The original that I worked from was a sign for five-cent bottomless coffee, and this was the contemporary equivalent that came to mind.
This is a collaboration between Antoinette and I. Antoinette has a lovely drafting ability, and makes the most beautiful, colorful, jungle-inspired work. We’ve worked together in Inkscape, to help her expand her digital working style. In this case. I asked her if she had ever used a Wacom tablet, and she said that she had one, a small one. I brought out my lovely 24 inch Wacom, handed her the stylus, and she made this inspiring dancing figure you see above. I added the text below her illustration. We used an image of a lit match as the palette, and applied a range of tones from the very bright parts of the flame, to the darker smoky background. Fun work, and thanks Antoinette!
I was alerted to Toby Greenwalt’s great blog theanalogdivide by Sophie Brookover of Library Link NJ, in which Toby just proposed a series of design problems as they relate to libraries. I love a good design problem. Here he introduces the first problem, and below I answer it in my own way.
“Your first challenge? Create a online library card signup. You could say that signing up for a library card is our equivalent of what websites refer to as onboarding – the process with which a user becomes part of that site. Sites invest significant work-hours and enormous sums of money to make this process as appealing as possible?
Libraries? Not so much. Whether through requiring in-person visits, confusing policy, or resorting to PDFs, libraries tend to get in their own way when it comes to attracting new users. We can do better than this. I’d like to use this inaugural Challenge to prove it.
Your criteria:
- Design a workflow that a hypothetical user would use to sign up for your hypothetical library. You’ll need to use this design to address the issue of proving residency.
- If there’s a policy that needs to be set in order to make your design work, you’ll need to explain that policy.
- Any medium is OK. Pencil-and-paper. Google Form. Flowchart. Photoshop mockup. Working prototype.
- If you draw inspiration from somewhere, cite your sources. I’d love to hear a bit about your process.
- You must have your design published by Monday, May 5th. Remember to email me (toby at theanalogdivide dot com) with the link. If you don’t have your own web space, feel free to send me the design and I’ll publish it here.”
~ theanalogdivide » Blog Archive » The Librarian Design Challenge –
So my answer is as follows:
This mimics Google’s own location verification process for business registration listing in Google Places service https://support.google.com/business/answer/2911778?hl=en&visit_id=637299706572194876-2550561397&rd=1).
Please see the entire chapter by reading part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. This is the conclusion:
It is not enough to passively look at other’s pins. By actively engaging other users, you will gain new followers, develop an audience, and establish an extension of your brand. Go into Pinterest in the main page and look at what interests you and your library, and repin it. If things show up on your home page that you do not like, unfollow those boards. Search out new great pins by visiting the popular category or do a search on an important topic to your library. Find pins, boards, and users that matter and follow them to make your home page more interesting. When you find an interesting pin, repin or like it. When you find an interesting pin that you do not have a board for, like it, or if it is particularly related to your library, make a new board. Make boards that represent your library’s core interests, keywords, metadata, and mission. If you are an academic library, focus on the subjects and expertise at your institution. If you are a public library, focus on your most well developed collections and programming. Then, comment, comment, comment. The point of most social media endeavors is to establish a voice for your institution and to exercise that voice in lots of forums, including social media platforms like Pinterest. The conversation you have may convert to an in-person visit by a patron who did not know that you had that great collection of 17th century glassware monographs.
Consider other pinners potential patrons, even if there is no chance that they would regularly visit your library. They may have 40, 400, or 4,000 friends that are potential patrons, and they can help you to convert those users to visitors, friends, or followers. There is also the possibility that libraries will engage with virtual patronage more in the future. Pinterest is a way of engaging those virtual patrons. Pinterest has an amazing and customizable email system that can alert you to every interaction with your pins: every follow, every repin, and every comment. You should see each of those interactions as potential new starts of relationships between your library, its collection, and their interests. By taking the time to thank, comment, repin, or otherwise interact with pinners who have done the same with you, you dramatically increase a kind of Pinterest kharma that results in great returns in effort and investment in the areas of awareness, followership, and patronage.
Hopefully, you have some sense of your library’s brand and culture. Your library might be one that is especially dedicated to the history of your community, or perhaps you focus on teen engagement and culture, or perhaps your library is part of a long academic tradition of greatness. The art on the walls and the sounds in the halls are clues to who you are. The ease of navigation and the presence of technology, or not, indicate what is valued in your culture. All of these things can be extended in Pinterest, either by curating pins related to those ideals, or pinning the ideals themselves in the form of art, photos, videos and graphics on those topics. Maybe more importantly, don’t present yourself as something you are not. If you are more classic than cool, then emphasize that strength. If you are more adult contemporary than punk rock, then make that clear in your pins. Make sure that there is a sense of continuity between the boards you have on Pinterest and the experience one has when using your library in person.
When you examine a pin, one of the things that Pinterest shares about the pin is the site where it was found and other pins that were pinned from that site. In the lower right hand side of the pin, you’ll see “other pins from (URL)” If you click on that link to see the other pins from that site, you may find a lot of related curated content that makes sense for your collections. While there is no way in Pinterest to follow that source directly, I created a folder in my bookmarks on my browser where I keep these source sites. An example is http://pinterest.com/source/lemasney.com/ in which lemasney.com is the source. You can replace lemasney.com in this example in order to see if there are already pins from your favorite site. You can also bookmark those pinterest source URLs so that you can quickly visit and see the latest pins and repins related to that site. Most importantly, there should be a rich set of pins on the source page for your ILS.
A great example of this is Princeton Public Library’s pins from the Bibliocommons site: http://www.pinterest.com/source/princetonlibrary.bibliocommons.com/
For people who have not visited thriving, forward thinking, contemporary libraries, there is still sometimes a perception that libraries are simply warehouses for books, or bookstores without a register or cafe. If you use Pinterest simply to share latest asset acquisitions, with links through to your ILS, it’s a good start, but only a start. Remember that you have programming and events, cultural phenomena and news, staff who have useful and delightful opinions, art and music and games in and around the library, and a community that is both an influence and influenced by your institution. Make all of that quite evident in your boards, pins, and discussions. Carnegie-Stout Public Library, (cspl) on Pinterest, (http://goo.gl/O6BjNl) doe s agood job of this. They include boards on local issues in Dubuque, IA, staff picks, national poetry month, Star Wars, banned books, library produced video, and more.
Each pin has a description field that allows for 500 characters of text. Use it to go beyond the title, ISBN, and author of the subject of the pin. Talk about the reason that you included the pin, and what the subject means in the context of the brand of your library. Include a quote or little known fact about the subject. Ask a question and request a response. Incite an intellectual riot. Start a mental fire. Engage the mind.
One of the most impressive things for me when looking at someone’s pins or boards for the first time is how quickly I am able to assess whether I have alignment with that pinner. The idea of a picture being worth a thousand words is especially apropos here, in that I am able to see with some immediacy the color, shape, tone, interests, and ideas that a pinner finds important in barely a glance. Make sure that your library boards and pins are making the impression that you want them to, and more specifically, that they adequately represent the actual brand and culture of your library or organization. If your library is academic, make boatds and pins that show that. If your library is active and fun, show that in your boards and pins.
Visit https://pinterest.com/settings/ and pay special attention to the email settings section about halfway down the page. By getting emails when someone likes, repins, or follows you, you get indications of interest, potential new patrons, opportunities for new follows, introductions to important discussions, and a certain kind of karmic insight. When you see those notifications, you should take some time to click on the profiles of the pinners that liked, followed, or repinned you to see whether you can be of further value to them and in what other ways they may be of value to you. Sometimes, you may find your next great supporter, evangelist, or advocate with a lot of influence in their boards and followers. Note that only one email address is associated with the account, and as a result, you may want to use a canonical account (tech@yourlibrary.org) or even a specific Pinterest account (pinterest@yourlibrary.org) to manage the communication with Pinterest.
This is perhaps the most straightforward way to mashup your library with Pinterest. A link is a link is a link, and every pin has one. As we saw in the exemplar sites above, Pinterest can be a great way to visually advertise your other online destinations. While there are some sites that refuse pinning content, most notably Facebook, your ILS’ public facing pages, your Content Management System, and other publicly accessible sites will likely not refuse the sharing of visual content on Pinterest. If someone likes what you are pinning, they may very possibly click on your pin to learn more, find a lot of related content on your ILS or CMS, and click through to read more or borrow an asset. Once they are on your ILS, they can act as a normal patron. Pinterest simply acts in this case as a marketing, discussion, and social tool for getting people to your assets.
I am a graphic designer, teacher, technologist, library lover, media specialist, philosopher, whole food advocate, and open source software supporter. When you visit my Pinterest profile at http://pinterest.com/lemasney those things become self-evident because those are amongst my most populated boards’ names. What kind of library are you? Are you academic with a focus on music history, compositional manuscripts, and early recordings? Maybe you are a public library with an emphasis on teen programming, games, and graphic novels? Perhaps you are a special collections library for a specific industry, with an amazing collection of historical artifacts related to that industry. Whatever the case, it should be the first thing that meets the eye when someone sees your boards.
As curators, collectors, classifiers, enablers and educators, libraries should see Pinterest as a uniquely aligned platform for those activities. Use it to make a visually oriented catalog to your services, collections, interests and culture. Use it to engage and promote. Use it to market and inform. Use it to discuss and challenge. Use it as a way to find a new set of patrons, supporters, and advocates. Many new follows await you.
Please visit part 1, part 2 and part 3 to read the rest of the chapter so far.
Searching – the search engine in Pinterest is a fantastic starting point to help build a board. If you are looking to develop conversations about your vast bicycling historical artifacts collection, maybe start with a search on vintage bicycles. By searching on topics, keywords, and tags from your ILS collection in Pinterest, you’ll be able to find pinners with like minds, boards related to your topics, individual pins that speak to your collection, and sources to gather more visual information for new pins.
Research – Once you add a pin and it is part of your curation in a board, the pin gives you other resources such as the person who pinned it (who may be a source of other related pins and worth following), other pins from the domain where it was pinned from (which you can bookmark in your browser), and other boards containing the pin (which may be existing collections similar to the one you are building). Finding like-minded pinners and organizations on Pinterest is a large part of the power of Pinterest as a social network. You connect, share, and learn through imagery.
Discussions – the point of social media is to engage, and discussion is a great way to do that. Great pins spark great discussions, and can be a place for you to develop deeper or different relationships with real or virtual patrons. If you are followed by and follow patrons on Pinterest, you may even get to the point where you share pins individually between them and the library, which strengthens that relationship, but also potentially grows the understanding of your brand and theirs.
Collaboration – Pinterest makes it easy to invite people to curate together. If you’ve ever wanted a low-threshold way to bring staff together around a topic, invite patrons to develop programming in a low-risk way, or invite an untapped demographic to engage with your library, Pinterest’s group boards may be a great way to do that. Create a board about Children’s Services, Emerging Technologies, Technology Programming, Learning Resources, or other topics to begin to show your interest in those topics.
Curation – Pinterest is a platform for curation, collection, organization, citation, classification, and review. That should all make perfect sense to a librarian. You can use Pinterest as a second catalog, but one that catalogs everything that your library does and cares about, not just the assets.
Campaigns and Programming – if the main way that you are marketing your events and programming is via paper fliers inside your library, consider just pinning those fliers (in digital form) to a programming board or boards as a way of seeing if it increases awareness and participation. If discussions, repins, likes, and follows happen, that would be great too.
Please take a look at part 1 and part 2 of this serial chapter on Pinterest as well.
According to a Pew study on social media user demographics in 2013, Pinterest is 5 times as likely to be used by females as males. 15% of all Internet users used Pinterest. The typical Pinterest user is white and well-educated. The system was equally popular amongst users in the 18-29 and 30-49 age groups, both making up about 19% of users each. ) As a result, you may be able to engage more successfully with this demographic using Pinterest than other social media platforms, as other systems have different demographics. I personally feel that if more diverse groups could see other ways that the system can be used that the demographic would change dramatically. I do not feel particularly feminine, have no interest in flower arrangements, and am not getting married anytime soon. Despite this, I feel like I have a great visual thinking and sharing tool in Pinterest.
With pins that lead to its blogs, others that focus on its elaborate art collections and media, and some that create a playlist of music and other media to check out, this amazing library shares and extends its culture using Pinterest.
This library takes its intense focus on the very visual topic of architecture and offers a feast of images related to the topic, organized in sensible ways. With boards that focus on things like landscape, tiny spaces, bridges, furniture, and restaurants, it quickly makes you aware of the limitless ways in which we can begin to think about architecture.
With boards that explore the great libraries of the world, others that focus on ALA’s presidents, and some that request that you engage in a discussion (Ask ALA), this is a great example of how larger umbrella organizations related to libraries can celebrate and incorporate all libraries while cheering themselves on.
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