Dear Members,
Last Monday some of us enjoyed hearing John LeMasney discuss the new social media tool “Pinterest” at Princeton University. For those of you who missed the meeting, our Web Master Nicole Engard has kindly posted her notes and links to the presentation.
Our next meeting will be held at Rider University in Lawrenceville on Wednesday, May 16 when Robert Lackie will provide information on Internet Security. Please try to join us!
In January, Louise Deis, our Program Chair and I enjoyed attending the SLA Leadership Summit in Atlanta, Georgia, where we met other chapter officers and discussed many interesting ideas for chapter activities. My brief article about the summit will be published soon in Library Hi-Tech News by Emerald Publishing (volume 29, issue 2) and I will post the link once it is available.
Our chapter will celebrate our 45th anniversary this year and I would like to organize an event to mark the occasion. We still need to formulate a small committee to work on details, so send me any ideas on theme, speakers or venues (email me at zanaett77@yahoo.com) If you would like to help, let me know. We are hoping to hold a dinner sometime in either June or October.
The executive board will meet on April 11 for our first board meeting. Please send me any concerns, ideas or suggestions before that date so that we can add them to the agenda.
We still have several unfilled chair positions. If anyone is interested in volunteering to be chair of Employment, Archives, Continuing education, Public Relations or Sponsorship, contact me.
Don’t forget to register for the SLA Annual Conference which will be held in Chicago July 15-18 if you plan to attend.
The NJLA Conference will be held June 4-6 at the new Revel Hotel in Atlantic City, and they will extend member rates to our chapter members.
Enjoy the spring weather and beautiful flowers. I will report on the board meeting discussions in my next message, and I hope to see many of you at the meeting in May!
Sincerely,
Zana Etter, 2012 P-T SLA Chapter President

Last night I and my fellow SLA PT members attended a talk on Pinterest given by John LeMasney. Pinterest does one thing and does that one thing very well – it’s an image sharing/bookmarking tool.

Social Visual Bookmarking Precedents

John started by showing us sites that came before Pinterest that had/have a similar purpose :

• Delicious
  The idea of social bookmarking became popular with Delicious, but has lost a lot of users because of Yahoo!’s poor management of the news that they were no longer going to support it.
• Diigo
  Diigo sort of picked up the pieces when it looked like Delicious was going away. They took the model of Delicious and then built more features on to it.
• FFFFOUND
  This tool allows a limited set of users who were found to be digital content curators to share their images with others. The limit to users means that you probably can’t get an account, but it also means that you’re going to find many amazing images. This site is geared more toward the visual designer versus the average user.
• We♥It
  Another visual sharing site, but is much less exclusive than FFFFOUND is.
• Vi.sualize.us
  Another visual sharing site.
• Piccsy
  Yet another visual sharing site.

Pinning, repinning, following and liking

Which brings us to Pinterest. John gave us a brief tour of the features of Pinterest including: Searching, Pinning, and Pinboards

Pinning is how you share images on Pinterest. Like on Delicious where you would ‘bookmark’ a page, on Pinterest you ‘pin’ it. You then organize your ‘pins’ by putting them on Pinboards. You can also create group managed Pinboards like my ‘Picture for Presentations‘ board. What you can’t do yet is create a private board – all boards that you create a public at this time (this is one of the suggestions John has on his Pinterest Suggestions board).

We’re going to come back to this, but if, when you pin something, you take the time to enter a citation in the description box, you will avoid some of the potential trouble with Pinterest’s terms of service.

Another thing we found while asking questions and poking around was that people can add you to groups without your approval, you can remove yourself from groups. If you’re seeing things on your Pinterest list of ‘Pinners you follow’ from people you don’t know it might be that you were added to a group, so click on the image and see if you can track down why you’re seeing it and remove yourself from the group if you’re not really interested in that topic.

Lots of people are using Pinterest to try and sell things – but we’re not trying to sell – we’re just trying to get people in the library. Free is so much easier than selling, we just have to be in people’s faces and right now those faces are in front of Pinterest.

You can also ‘Repin’ items. This is when you find an image that someone else shared and you re-share it. One example is if you have a cooking program. You can find the board owned by the chef showing pics of his/her recipes and repin them to the library board to promote the event.

Branding best practices

Some obvious best practicees – participate! So many people and organizations sign up and then don’t use the tool. This looks very bad for you and for your brand. I have found several companies on Pinterest that have never shared a thing! Don’t do this. And along with that participation is to do something regularly.

Obviously you want to respect copyright and ownership. Add citations to descriptions and educate others how to do this.

Include links! You want to add a link to the description or by editing the image you have posted and adding in a link. You want to make sure you link back to your library site or ILS or whatever page at your library you’re posting content from.

Make sure you remember your brand! If you’re sharing content on your library site on Pinterest you want to make sure you stick to your brand. Make sure you use language that you’d use in a press release or on your website in your descriptions. That said, don’t only pin your own stuff. Make sure you share things from other boards that have to do with your events, your philosophy, your mission, etc. This makes you a member of the community on Pinterest.

Use group boards. Collaborate with colleagues and patrons so that you can benefit from their participation and extend your community even more. A group you could share with your patrons is to say ‘What I Like About Libraries’ and have your patrons share things they like about libraries – it gives you ideas and promotes libraries in general. Always remember to add keywords and hashtags to add metadata to a system where there is no other great method for metadata (yet).

More tips: http://bloggingwithamy.com/pinterest-tips.

Copyright and fair use

What do Facebook, Pinterest and a scholarly article all have in common?

It could be peer review, it could be respecting copyright, it could be proper citations – you just have to make it that way!

Why does Pinterest say they own all of your pins?

Because they’re trying to cover their behinds. In Pinterest’s terms of service they say that they own everything you post on Pinterest. In reality what they’re trying to say is that they’re not responsible if someone illegally shares your work on their site. They don’t want to be sued because they provided a platform for copyright infringement.

Copyright is not given – so in the end Pinterest cannot say that they “own” your content, they’re just trying to protect themselves.

Filtering and search

Basically you can search for images, boards and people. Nothing much else to say here.

Settings

Going to your settings in Pinterest will allow you to turn off sharing on Facebook and other social networks. So if you use Pinterest for personal reasons and Facebook for professional or vice versa you might not want to share content from Pinterest on Facebook automatically. You can also limit emails that you receive and other general settings.

Suggested improvements

• Improved searching. It would be great to search by color, camera, etc etc etc.
• Metadata. Adding tags and tag clouds would help you find information and see what type of things certain people are pinning.
• Tagging people and places. It would nice to geotag and tag faces like you can in Facebook and Flickr.
• Android App. There is only an iPhone app right now.
• Licensing options. I should be able to say that this is not mine, or is mine, or put a creative commons license on it – again this is something that Flickr does already.
• Threaded discussion. There is no way to reply to a specific comment – it’s a flat discussion format.
• See John’s Pinterest Suggestions

Presentation

John recorded his session for us all and it can be watched here:

He also has a post on his site about the talk.

Pinterest is an exciting new social networking service that uses visual media to promote ideas. John LeMasney will give a broad overview of Pinterest and explain how to use it to promote your personal and organizational brand. With Pinterest, you can follow others, and others can follow you; pin visual items, like photos and videos, to categorical boards and repin others’ pins that you find interesting. You can collaborate with others to make collective boards. You can like things that you enjoy but that are fleeting or less categorizable; pin things that you find online, or things that you upload yourself. Pinterest takes the best parts of Diigo, Twitter, Facebook, and other networks and gives them a very pretty, unified face. It is a quickly growing network, with phenomenal adoption rates, and users who often say they are addicted to pinning.

The PT chapter thanks Jane Holmquist and Susan Moss for planning this meeting. If you have any questions, please contact (Susan Moss, susanmossmls@yahoo.com 609-777-0658)

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Directions to Campus Club
Link to Google Map: Princeton University’s Campus Club
Princeton University’s Campus Club is located at 5 Prospect Ave., Princeton, New Jersey 08540-5299, at the corner of Prospect Ave. and Washington Road, across from The Woodrow Wilson School.

From Rte. 1, go west on Washington Road (County Road 526), into Princeton. You will pass a stop light at Faculty Road. The second stop light is at Ivy Lane, which goes off only to the right. The third stop light is Prospect Avenue, which also goes off only to the right.

From Nassau St. in Princeton, turn east, onto Washington Road. Pass Williams Street, which goes off only to the left. Prospect Avenue is the next street, which also goes off only to the left.

You can park for free in University parking lots after 5:00 p.m. University lots are located on Ivy Lane and Williams Street. Metered parking is also available on Prospect Avenue.