Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Pinterest Curiosity
Who uses Pinterest? I have heard people using pinterest for work, for library programming and displays, for personal use for recipes, hairstyles and decorating ideas. I am curious to know who in our Neighborhood Libraries uses it and how. Pretend I was patron, who had just heard about this, so I came into the library to find out more. How would you describe it? What are its best features? If you took them to the website and were showing them how to navigate it, what would you search by to present it to them?
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I use it - mostly for personal use, but I also have a board for library display ideas.
ReplyDeleteI would describe it as a website full of bulletin boards. You can start a different board for whatever you want to pin up - one for recipes to try, another for books to read, a third for decorating ideas - whatever interests you. To show it to a patron I would search something like "chicken recipe." Pinterest would then generate a whole bunch of pictures of chicken recipes that other people have pinned onto their bulletin boards. Whatever looks tasty I can click on, and it will take me to the external website it was pinned from, which probably tells how to make it. I think the best features are that it is a bunch of pictures - a feast for the eyes, and that it takes you to the original website even if the pin has been repinned over and over by different people. It is great that you can gather ideas - like magazine clippings without having to buy the magazine.
I use it for visual stimulation when I'm bored and to find and gather ideas for things like recipes and craft projects.
Ditto to everything Sarah said! I describe it as "visual bookmarking." I use it for personal ideas, to collect recipes and craft projects, but I also use it for work, to gather early literacy ideas and storytime activities. I'd also tell a patron that they don't have to have an account to scan through the ideas. You can't search without being logged in, but you can look through, say, all the "Gardening" pins or all the "Cars & Motorcycles" pins. I find it very powerful for organizing and finding craft & projects & recipes because it feels so much easier and more comfortable to scan through lots of images to find what you're looking for than to scan through a bunch of text-based links, like you might get in a Google search or in your delicious account.
ReplyDeleteI somehow find it relaxing, entertaining and enlightening all at once- kind of mixes work with play in an organized way. Since you can just browse quickly, and the photos are so appealing, it feels playful, but there are great ideas for any topic.
ReplyDeleteYes, I see that my family uses it alot, especially on Facebook. I'm just getting into it now.
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