Category: portfolio

This is a portfolio of my work in many forms. It should give you some insight as to the products I might help you to create.

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64 of 365: Using Pinterest to Gain a Visual Following (Book Chapter as Serial Post part 5)

fig 08 - successful pin
fig 08 - successful pin

Please see the entire chapter by reading part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. This is the conclusion:

What can I do to mashup Pinterest and my Library?

1. Pin, repin and comment. Be a part of the community.

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.

fig 08 - successful pin in Pinterest
fig 08 – successful pin in Pinterest

2. Respond and interact with followers, repinners, and commenters.

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.

3. Match your brand, culture, and vision

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.

4. Find sources of great pins and bookmark them.

fig 09 - pin source query in Pinterest
fig 09 – pin source query in Pinterest

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/

5. Be more than books.

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.

6. Teach, learn, and discuss.

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.

7. Cultivate a visual culture to clarify your library’s brand.

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.

8. Setup your email settings, external links, and profile properly.

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.

9. Get clicks through to your ILS, blog, and other library destinations.

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.

10. Make your boards your library’s brand keywords.

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.

In conclusion

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.

 

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63 of 365: How to truly appreciate an orange.

December 20, 2009
December 20, 2009 (Photo credit: HeatherBradleyPhotography)

 

  1. Have trouble with your car.
  2. Have a friend stop by the grocery and pick you up some groceries. Ask them to pick up soup, fruit, and cough medicine.
  3. Have them pick you up to take you to your first client appointment of the day.
  4. Understand that your friend can not possibly drive you around all day, and resort to walking to each of your other appointments or using public transit where available.
  5. Underestimate the heat of the new spring day and the distance between meeting places, by miles.
  6. On your walk to meeting four, almost pass out.
  7. Come across the most beautiful park bench you have ever seen, a simple affair of wood and metal.
  8. Sit down, rest yourself, and sit for a moment. Re-catch your focus.
  9. Suddenly remember that there might be ready-to-eat food in bag two.
  10. Find orange, unwrap it, and bite into its red, seedless, juicy flesh until it’s gone. Walk on.

 

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62 of 365: Using Pinterest to Gain a Visual Audience (book chapter as serial post, part 4)

fig 07 - architecture search results
fig 07 - architecture search results

Please visit part 1, part 2 and part 3 to read the rest of the chapter so far.

How does one use Pinterest?

fig 07 - architecture search results
fig 07 – architecture search results

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.

fig 07.5 - more from lemasney.com
fig 07.5 – more from lemasney.com

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.

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61 of 365: Using Pinterest to Gain a Visual Following (book chapter as serial post, part 3)

fig 06 - lemasney 01
fig 06 - lemasney 01

Please take a look at part 1 and part 2 of this serial chapter on Pinterest as well.

Who is using Pinterest?

fig 06 - lemasney 01
fig 06 – lemasney 01

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.

What are some examples of libraries who are making good use of Pinterest?

New York Public Library Art and Picture Collection

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.

UNLV Architecture Studies Library

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.

American Libraries Magazine – ALA

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.

10 Inspiring Pinterest Collections Created by Libraries and Librarians
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60 of 365: Using Pinterest to Gain a Visual Following (book chapter as serial post, part 2)

fig 04 - princeton public library
fig 04 - princeton public library

Please visit the first entry in this series and stay tuned for the following parts of this chapter.

What makes Pinterest a preferable social network for organizations such as libraries to embrace?

Pinterest is a social network (a place where people come together to connect) which focuses on visual content, such as pictures, graphics, diagrams, logos, videos, animations and other imagery. In fact, without an image or a video, you can not post to Pinterest. This sets it apart from other social networks, like Facebook, where a posting can be text-based.

fig 04 - princeton public library
fig 04 – princeton public library

Libraries can make use of this visually oriented service to engage patrons and other stakeholders differently than they can in person, on other social networks, or through other communication methods. Because of the visual focus of the system, Pinterest can become a visual catalog for browsing departments, a magazine of the latest program offerings, or an archive of events and milestones. Used effectively, following guidelines and examples below, you may be able to entice an otherwise untapped audience through visual means.

What is the social networking benefit of Pinterest?

fig 05 notifications
fig 05 notifications

Libraries may wonder how Pinterest is of value comparative to other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Pinterest is useful from a social marketing perspective in several ways. Many of its users consider it addictive, and spend hours using the system each week. As users click on one interesting item, they are shown other related items of similar interest. They can collect the most interesting items they find into ‘boards’, essentially making them curators and explorers of valuable content. People can then find, share, and follow those pins and boards, creating a sort of community of common interest. When users in the system find other users with similar tastes, they can follow those users and be exposed to more interesting, valuable, curated content. In the case of libraries or librarians as users, one can connect with patrons, be exposed to library trends by following other interesting libraries, follow publishers and media producers who share content that they find to be of value to their patrons, staff and other stakeholders. In particular, because Pinterest is a purely visual sharing system (as stated above, to create a pin, you must upload or find an image, graphic, photo or video,) it allows a user to very quickly assess if they are in philosophical, ideological, or simply visual alignment with another Pinterest user. Compare this to other systems, where you might have to assess alignment by reading through a few (or many more) tweets or status updates, which can be time-consuming and analytical. With Pinterest, a patron can look at a library’s page of pins or boards of another user and judge ideological alignment much quicker, sometimes in seconds. When libraries make sensible, brand related choices about their pins and boards in Pinterest, it can be incredibly powerful as a community building tool.

 

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59 of 365: Using Pinterest to Gain a Visual Following (A book chapter as serial post, part 1)

fig 01 - lemasney on Pinterest
fig 01 - lemasney on Pinterest

The following posts were written and proposed as a book chapter on Pinterest for Libraries, but the chapter was not accepted. Sad, except that now it means that I have some content to share publicly with you! Over the next few days, I’ll be publishing the chapter as a series of posts.

John LeMasney of LeMasney Technology and Design Consulting will discuss Pinterest, a visual social bookmarking system that is often dismissed as simply a place for wedding photos and pictures of vegetarian recipes. Pinterest is a way to collect, curate, share and discuss photos and videos of any kind, and this article will discuss 10 ways you can use it to engage patrons and other stakeholders in the visual brand, items, and topics at libraries. You can increase the visibility of your programs, and give people new ways to click through to discover and borrow your assets.

A Pinterest glossary

fig 01 - lemasney on Pinterest
fig 01 – lemasney on Pinterest

I thought that it would be useful to start with a short glossary of terms related to Pinterest for the uninitiated. There is a culture to Pinterest, and with any good culture comes a kind of vocabulary.

Pin – A pin is a single shared image or video on Pinterest. A pin consists of a digital image or video, an optional link to the original site, and a description for the pin, up to 500 characters long. Great pins are attractive regardless of their context, but their context, history, and source should be present. Think of a pin as a way to inform people of information literacy, scholarship, and ideological respect in addition to the basic idea of the pin itself. Libraries can use pins to share elements of their organizational brand: what makes them unique as a library.

Pinning – Pinning is the act of sharing a pin on Pinterest. Pinning can be done exceptionally well or rather lazily. Pinners who care will add metadata, a reasonable description, links back to source sites, and encourage discussion. Pinners who are just passing the time will put up a single word description, not consider the link or source, and not respond to discussions, repins, and other cultural niceties. A library pinterest effort might include an emerging technologies librarian as the sole pinner, but there is a potential for richness when administrators, staff, and patrons are all invited to pin.

fig 02 - also pinned to
fig 02 – also pinned to

Repin – A repin is the act of taking a pin that already exists on Pinterest and sharing it on one of your own boards, effectively giving it a vote of confidence and admiration. Repinning is a kind of moral engine on Pinterest, helping people’s pins to reach larger and larger audiences. When libraries repin pins, they show that they are looking at other people’s pins, making a decision about their alignment with that person, and inviting them to check out the library’s pins. Repins are important in building a community.

fig 03 - the pin it button
fig 03 – the pin it button

Pinmarklet – A combination of the words Pinterest and Bookmarklet, the Pinmarklet is a javascript button that you copy to your bookmarks bar and click whenever you are on a site where you find something worth sharing. It greatly simplifies the pinning process compared to the “share pin” feature on the site itself. Libraries who use pinterest should consider adding the pinmarklet to staff computer images, so that they are encouraged to pin library related pins.

Comment – each pin on Pinterest has the ability for anyone to comment. By commenting, you effectively notify the pinner of your interest in the content, and give them the opportunity to begin a conversation with you. One can argue that the very point of social media in any form is to begin a discussion. If you pin a new acquisition and have it link through to your ILS, that’s an invitation to borrow that item. If you start a discussion to talk about why the media was acquired for your collection, you engage not only patrons and potential patrons, but also give the opportunity for a better understanding of why your library makes the choices it does.

Board – A board is the curation space on Pinterest, where you add, share, comment, and collaborate on pins. Your boards for your library should be essentially a visual version of your catalog, but also a business card, a note of thanks, a reminder of programming, and an insight into what your library really is, behind the buildings, people, and things in it.

Shared board – Boards can be co-curated by 2, 10, 100 or more pinners. You can invite other pinners that share the common interest of the board. The board’s creator may remove pinners at any time, or pinners can remove themselves. For libraries, shared boards are great opportunities. You could have a “patrons’ picks” board, in which only patrons post. You might carry a theme for the month, like “flying” or “government” and make boards that invite experts amongst your staff and patronage in those topics to pin what they know.

Follow – Pinners can follow boards that they like, with the key benefit being that they see new pins from those boards prioritized on their homepage. Pinners can choose to follow another pinners individual boards, or can follow the pinner wholesale. One can unfollow tiresome boards at any time. It is essential that you follow people with the library account. Following shows that you are not just interested in yourself, and also makes your home page far more interesting. When you follow people whose pins are related to yours, you see more of those kinds of pins when you open Pinterest.

Private Board – One innovation that Pinterest implemented in response to users was the ability to pin to a private board, which can also be a shared (collaborative) board. Their key example in explaining the function was to do party planning without the party’s purpose knowing about it, but many others cited that the prurient or otherwise controversial nature of some pins makes one less likely to repin them if others are watching. Private boards solve that issue. As a library, you might have private planning boards for upcoming events where you can collect pins related to the idea. Then when it is time to advertise the event, you can make the board public.

Like – One may like a pin rather than repin it, which adds it to a liked list, a kind of board in itself. Liked pins have all of the function and purpose of a pin or repin, but are useful especially in cases where the pin does not easily fit into your existing boards. You might like things that you do not necessarily want to associate with your library directly, e.g. an academic science library might want their boards to focus on science topics, but they might also ‘like’ pins about food. If the food is science related, even better.

Pinner – A user on the Pinterest system; one who pins. In creating an account for a Library, it is better if your personal Pinterest account is not used, so that you can separate your personal brand from the library brand. In fact, it is better to have a Library as a business account in Pinterest, so that you can get the added benefits of that mode (below).

Certified users and business accounts – you can associate yourself with a particular URL by going through an authentication process that allows you to gain statistical insights about pins from your web site. Libraries on Pinterest should consider this process since they may want to know if people are clicking on pins to visit their ILS for instance. Polaris, amongst other social media aware cataloging systems, allow for the pinning of assets by patrons right from the catalog if enabled.

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