Digging deeper into social media, I began a Pinterest account for the law library today: http://www.pinterest.com/iumaurerlawlib.
Of all the social media, I find to Pinterest to be one of the most addicting to play around with. That said, we are certainly not the first library, and not even the first law library, to dive in. Pinterest allows a user to create “boards” on which to pin images on a subject of the user’s choosing. A personal Pinterest account might have a board for recipes, another for crafts, and another for books. (I don’t believe there’s a limit to the number of boards one can have.) A library could have the same personal categories, or it might tailor them to library services, for instance, images of the dust jackets for their newest acquisitions. This is the direction our Pinterest account is running.
Apart from creating boards, Pinterest users follow others’ boards, picking them based on their own interests. So far we are following the few other law libraries with Pinterest accounts, as well as a few organizations related to law schools, such as CALI.org. If you see a pin on another’s board that you like, you can repin the image to one of your boards, ‘like’ the pin, and/or comment on the pin.
As with so much of the social media out there, Pinterest also allows a user to post pins to Twitter and Facebook accounts. Since the law library’s Twitter and Facebook accounts are linked, this means I can pin to one of our Pinterest accounts, have it announced on our Twitter page, and have that tweet fed into our Facebook timeline! Aaahhh, interconnectedness!
Having just begun the account today, our account is quite small. We have two boards begun, one with quotes from/about lawyers and the law, and one highlighting some of our latest acquisitions. I would like to add some more boards, highlighting some of our databases and research guides, and eventually some fun boards about the library as well.
I am excited to see where our Pinterest account takes us. It’s another, different, way for us to reach out to patrons, and we’ll see where it goes from here.
lawbrarianship 