Welcome to the eRecords Project

We ran a working group of library staff for 12 weeks with a brief to explore Pinterest, engage with the Pinterest community, and evaluate Pinterest’s potential to help us deliver services and facilitate access to our collections.

Pinterest is a website that allows users to create virtual pin boards of their favourite images and to interact with other pinners and their selections. 

ASSESS

Pinterest was chosen because it is a popular social media resource in the Australian community, with more than 630,000 people each month using it[1], there were other cultural institutions using it (eg. Europeana, Getty and British Library) and it seemed to be a good match for displaying the Library’s digitised photographs and other services.   

There were a number of risks and issues we had to consider and manage, including copyright – we used photographs prior to 1955 which are usually out of copyright[2] and images on publishers websites with a “Pin It” button indicating implied permission to pin images. We cited details of copyright owners and in some cases contacted copyright owners to ask permission to pin their images (eg Book Art).  In representing the Library online we also consider our reputation – when choosing boards and accounts to follow and items to repin, we always keep in mind that this is an implied endorsement by the Library.

EXPLORE

As part of the working group we established three accounts: one for most Library collections and services , and separate accounts for services that have specific client groups: Druginfo  and Multicultural services.

We have pinned a variety of images and links to Pinterest, including:

• a “reading list” of books set, published or written in NSW
• our research guides and resources (including Family History and HSC students and teachers)
• links to Hot Topics and Find Legal Answers
• boards to support our exhibitions (eg Greatest Wonder)
• resources relevant to our learning programs (Seeking Shakespeare, Antarctica Uncovered, Early Explorers)
• images to showcase the Library spaces, services and environment
• boards showcasing many items from our collections
• of course, our mascot Trim has his own board!

We tried to promote the library spaces and services as well as collection items, expanding the ways we could use Pinterest.  We also tried to challenge the stereotype that Pinterest was mostly of interest to women. 

ENGAGE

• The “group boards” feature in Pinterest allows multiple users to pin to a single board. We have extended an invitation to NSW public library staff to join our group board “Books in NSW”.
• We deliberately pinned library fan photos from instagram (we were inspired by the Insta-Getty board to try this idea)
• Repins from our boards continue to grow steadily to more than 1100 to April 2013.
• Our most popular board continues to be HSC resources, targeting high school students and their teachers.

 EVALUATE

• We monitored how many people interacted with our pins via liking, repinning and commenting. This helps us to estimate the return on investment for the time involved and the reach into the community.
• Team members wrote an article for ALIA’s Incite magazine about using Pinterest and Historypin for community engagement around the Library’s collections. 
• With limited access to analytical tools to measure virality, we couldn’t measure how many times something that is repinned from our boards was repinned further. It would be interesting to know where some of our pins end up.
• We are continuing to use Pinterest in different ways and an interesting example is promoting the Jean Arnot Memorial Fellowship.

References:

Barwick, K. and A. Reddacliff, V. Tracey (2013 March) "Pin-pointing Communities: The NSW State Library's Innovation Project", Incite Volume 34 Issue 3 p. 22 

[1] http://www.socialmedianews.com.au/social-media-statistics-australia-april-2013/

[2] http://www.copyright.org.au/find-an-answer/browse-by-what-you-do/photographers/

It can appear that social media in an organisation is a lot of small pieces loosely joined, a variety of channels and disparate audiences focussing on different formats and niche interests.  But online engagement, reaching out to target audiences and allocating resources to support our interaction with those online communities, effectively coordinating and cross promoting activities and campaigns online and onsite, and measuring effectiveness are critical pieces of an online engagement strategy. 

“You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things,
so that all the small things go in the right direction.” (Alvin Toffler)

SCALING UP FOR THE FUTURE

An added dimension for the State Library is the large scale digitisation project, Digital Excellence.  Through this project we will have a rapidly increasing amount of material that will be available via our virtual reading room, just as through the eRecords Project we are drastically increasing the online catalogue access to our collections.  Our online engagement will need to scale up to promote many more collections and to meet the growing demand of clients and communities.  As part of the Digital Excellence project, the Library is developing a whole of Library web and new media strategy.  In 2012 the Innovation Project leaders recognised a need for a strategy that sits within the larger whole, one that focuses on what we aim to achieve through using social media channels to deliver library services and engage with our communities. 

We found some excellent articles, blog posts and books on the topic (see the reading list below) but we also wanted to build the capacity of our staff to be involved in online engagement and to see how it could be a useful part of their own work and incorporated in planning future activities. Good ideas can come from many different places in a large and diverse organisation like ours, so we also need a shared understanding of what we mean by online engagement in social media spaces and how we make it happen.  

DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT FRAMEWORK

While exploring these ideas we stumbled upon a blog post by Jasper Visser introducing the concept of a Digital Engagement Framework.  Although it was primarily developed for museums, the Library has a lot in common with other collecting institutions and the framework appeared to translate well to the Library’s environment. 

We were fortunate to have the opportunity for Library staff to attend a two day workshop exploring Digital Engagement with Jasper in November 2012.  The workshop was a two day journey through the digital engagement framework, exploring it in the context of our Library, our assets (collections), our audiences (clients and communities) and learning about a range of social media tools that could be used, metrics that could apply, and lessons learned from other social media campaigns, both best practice and cautionary tales.

This framework now forms one part of our overall web and new media strategy for the Library, but perhaps more importantly has given us a common language to describe our intentions in planning online engagement and the way we will go about it.

Further reading:

Digital engagement framework

• Digital engagement framework
• Visser, J. (2012 November 30) Five thoughts about digital engagement strategy after ten days in Sydney
• Visser, J. (2012 June 04) Introducing the digital engagement framework and an app to improve your stay at hotels

Digital engagement in libraries

• David Lee King.  Face2face: Using Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media Tools to Create Great Customer Connections. Information Today, 2012 
• Troy A. Swanson. Managing Social Media in Libraries: Finding Collaboration, Coordination, and Focus.  Chandos, 2012