Pinterest and Academia

Date, Location

Tue, 09/18/2012 - 11:00am - 12:30pm

About the Event

The immense popularity of Pinterest paired with its potential research applications makes it a strong resource in the modern academic library tool box. Pinterest has more than 10 million users, drives more traffic than Google+, Linkedin, and YouTube combined, and has been called “2012’s hottest website”. Pinterest in a virtual pinboard for “pinning” images you discover online or add yourself. It serves as a way to discover or share pictures and infographics and visually curate online resources for your own use or collaboratively.

Pinterest is important for academic and research libraries because of its implications for information usage, content sharing, service enhancements, and opportunities for collaboration and PR. This webcast will introduce Pinterest and its usage, outline the technology trends represented by Pinterest and their impacts on libraries and information usage, explore academic and library applications, and guide you through projects to try at your library.

Learning Outcomes:

• Gain an understanding of Pinterest as a tool, a general understanding of its uses, popularity, benefits for libraries, and its impacts upon research and library services.
• Gain knowledge of Pinterest and the important trends within online information engagement that it represents: visual search/discovery, social image sharing, and self curation of content along with the applications of Pinterest to various steps in the research process.
• Discover skills to leverage trends in academic settings and assist researchers and students with applying these skills to their continued academic success.
• Learn about areas of implementations within the academic environment and the specific steps for successfully accomplishing various projects including creating Pinterest accounts for their libraries for marketing services and collections, leveraging the tool for subject liaison activities, utilizing Pinterest for instruction and orientation, optimizing online resources for use with Pinterest to extend their reach, addressing ethical use of visual information through proper applications and considerations, and for teaching and expanding information literacy skills as this tool relates to information engagement.

Cost: ACRL member - $50; ALA member - $75; Nonmember - $90; Student - $40

Event Website

http://www.ala.org/acrl/pinterest