Promoting Your Library through Pinterest

<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgosDsDgGBPAg8qpxz6QliOvSa5aWF_ULvfnY2bLOr92u_bUJOEEGxLRm4wKICGpuS2b0QG5W-ZX-S5j2HHKmYfNztksDIlbawGgJ5nUxw-rYx_NIiTZZLaepqGddTl34bPKaQcCwQj2gE/s1600/ferret-pins.png"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5708840696972276898" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgosDsDgGBPAg8qpxz6QliOvSa5aWF_ULvfnY2bLOr92u_bUJOEEGxLRm4wKICGpuS2b0QG5W-ZX-S5j2HHKmYfNztksDIlbawGgJ5nUxw-rYx_NIiTZZLaepqGddTl34bPKaQcCwQj2gE/s320/ferret-pins.png" style="float: left; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 0px;" width="284" /></a>If you are a librarian and haven't yet heard of <a href="http://pinterest.com/">Pinterest</a>, it's definitely worth a look, especially if your library is into leveraging social media to promote library services. Pinterest is a social networking site that lets users create groupings (pinboards) of images (pins) they find on the web or upload. Users can then interact with other people's pins and pinboards by "like"ing pins or by following pinboards.<br /><div><br />If you have already heard of Pinterest, it is probably because the site is making big news lately on the Interwebs. According to <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/pinterest-monthly-uniques/">comScore</a>, Pinterest was the fastest growing independent site to hit 10 million monthly unique visits in the U.S. <a href="http://blog.shareaholic.com/2012/01/pinterest-referral-traffic/">Another report</a> claims that Pinterest drives more referral traffic to online retailers than Google+, YouTube, Reddit and LinkedIn combined.<br /><br />By default, each pin is linked back to the website from whence it came. BUT, you can easily edit the pin's link and change it to wherever you'd like. <b>The ability to customize pin links unlocks all sorts of exciting possibilities for promoting your library's collections, services, and events.</b> For example, libraries could upload images of newly arrived books and then link those images directly to its catalog record. That is, when a patron clicks on the pin for a book, she could be directed to a page that makes it easy for her to hold or check out a copy. You could post items promoting an upcoming event and then post pictures from the event after it was done. And you could even pin an image of your chat widget, linked to your Ask-A-Librarian page, so that people with questions can get connected to your staff more easily.<br /><div><br /></div>Libraries are already jumping on the Pinterest band wagon. Here are just a few examples:<br /><ul><li><a href="http://pinterest.com/uofllibraries/">University of Louisville Libraries</a> currently has 5 boards, including Books, Videos, and Photographs.</li><li><a href="http://pinterest.com/westervlibrary/">Westerville Library</a> in Westerville, Ohio currently has 16 boards, including Bookish Crafts, Quotes About Reading, and Tweens/Teens Library Love.</li><li><a href="http://pinterest.com/clermontlib/">Clermont County Public Library</a> in Ohio current has 42 boards! They cover topics like staff pick books for a variety of age groups and genres, new books each month, and Going Green Books.</li></ul><div>If you are interested in looking into Pinterest for your library, Anne Clarke, who is a Children's Librarian in Michigan, recently published a really nice blog post entitled <a href="http://www.sotomorrowblog.com/2012/01/pinterest-for-librarians.html">Pinterest for Librarians</a>. <a href="http://joemurphylibraryfuture.com/pinterest-online-pinboard-with-promise-for-libraries/">Pinterest Online Curation Pinboard with Major Promise for Libraries</a>, written by Joe Murphy, is another good resource. Pinterest is currently in a beta phase. So you'll need an invite to get an account. You can request an invite via <a href="http://pinterest.com/">Pinterest's website</a> or <a href="mailto:support@libraryh3lp.com">e-mail us</a> and we can send you an invite through our Pinterest account. Yes, <a href="http://pinterest.com/libraryh3lp">LibraryH3lp is giving Pinterest a whirl</a>!<br /><br /></div><div>If you've spent any time with the widget designer in the admin site, you probably have come across the shared widget skins. As it stands, the shared skins is a long list of widgets that our libraries have created over the years. Its length is both a blessing and curse. You have lots of opportunity for inspiration, but then any enthusiasm quickly gets tempered by the sheer magnitude. Enter Pinterest. </div><div><br /></div><div>We're creating a <a href="http://pinterest.com/libraryh3lp/ask-a-librarian-chat-widgets/">visual library of widgets</a> and <a href="http://pinterest.com/libraryh3lp/ask-a-librarian-images/">Ask-A-Librarian images</a> intended to inspire and to encourage creativity when integrating chat widgets into websites. Eventually, we'd like to integrate these boards into our website. We've seeded the two boards with some examples (all linked directly to the originating library's Ask-A-Librarian service), but we'd love to have many more! As a testament to Pinterest's active user population, we're already getting followers and likes on our pins. If you would like to add your chat widget and/or Ask-A-Librarian image to our boards, <a href="mailto:support@libraryh3lp.com">please let us know</a>. And if you'd prefer us not to use your images, also <a href="mailto:support@libraryh3lp.com">let us know</a> and we will remove them from our boards.</div><div><div></div></div><div></div></div></p>

If you are a librarian and haven't yet heard of Pinterest , it's definitely worth a look, especially if your library is into leverag...

Updated admin site and webchat client coming soon!

<p>Just a quick heads-up that we'll be updating the admin site and webchat client in the next couple of weeks. We'll give an exact date when we're a little closer, but we wanted to give you a quick preview of all the improvements to come.<br /><div><br /></div><div>The updated admin site's new layout significantly improves management of large admin domains with lots of users and queues. We're also rearranging the ordering of the tabs so that common activities are most prominent. For example, the default start page will be "Activity" rather than "Users, Queues, and Gateways" so you can see what is going on with your chat service as soon as you log in. This makes more sense in the scheme of daily admin activities and should streamline your workflow. We are also improving time zone support. No more off-by-an-hour daylight savings time effects, and you'll have the ability to set your local time zone. Plus, we've added snazzy interactive reports where you can modify the graphs by clicking on the legends.<br /><br />The changes to the webchat client are less user-visible, facilitating an easy transition for your staff to the updated version. Initially, the most noticeable change will be easier navigation to Monitor Activity.</div><div><br /></div><div>These upgrades pave the way for exciting (and frequently requested) features, such as canned messages and the ability to centrally block abusive patrons. These new features will not be exposed in the new versions immediately, but they will be implemented as soon as possible after the first phase of changes. Under the hood, these updates represent modernization to the JavaScript libraries and pave the way for access control lists (ACLs), which will provide more fine-grained control over user permissions. </div><div><br /></div><div>Here is a screencast that provides a quick (less than 4 minutes!) overview of the updated admin site on our sister product, My Customer Cloud. This screencast was for the first public version of the updated admin site; we're adding a few more features to this version before we roll it out to LibraryH3lp.</div><br /><object data="http://content.screencast.com/users/psessoms/folders/LibraryH3lp%20Screencasts/media/516b35eb-7fcb-4436-9e77-ade1c1644489/scplayer.swf" height="450" id="scPlayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="610"><param name="movie" value="http://content.screencast.com/users/psessoms/folders/LibraryH3lp%20Screencasts/media/516b35eb-7fcb-4436-9e77-ade1c1644489/scplayer.swf"><param name="quality" value="high"><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><param name="flashVars" value="thumb=http://content.screencast.com/users/psessoms/folders/LibraryH3lp%20Screencasts/media/516b35eb-7fcb-4436-9e77-ade1c1644489/FirstFrame.png&containerwidth=1024&containerheight=768&autohide=true&autostart=false&loop=false&showendscreen=true&showsearch=false&showstartscreen=true&tocdoc=left&xmp=sc.xmp&content=http://content.screencast.com/users/psessoms/folders/LibraryH3lp%20Screencasts/media/516b35eb-7fcb-4436-9e77-ade1c1644489/New%20Admin%20Site%20Overview.mp4&blurover=false"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="scale" value="showall"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><param name="base" value="http://content.screencast.com/users/psessoms/folders/LibraryH3lp%20Screencasts/media/516b35eb-7fcb-4436-9e77-ade1c1644489/"><iframe type="text/html" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="overflow:hidden;" src="http://www.screencast.com/users/psessoms/folders/LibraryH3lp%20Screencasts/media/516b35eb-7fcb-4436-9e77-ade1c1644489/embed" height="768" width="1024"></iframe></object><br /><div><br /></div><div>Some users may quite logically wonder if it's possible to test out the updated versions before they go live, or for us to provide the current versions and new versions simultaneously for a period of transition time. Unfortunately, the ACL support requires API changes that are incompatible with the previous interfaces, and so this simply isn't possible. However, we hope that our updated documentation and screencasts will help ease any growing pains.</div><div><br /></div><div>We'll be sure to post an update once we're closer to releasing the changes.</div></p>

Just a quick heads-up that we'll be updating the admin site and webchat client in the next couple of weeks. We'll give an exact date...

Birthday wish granted! We haz Wordle.

<p>A big <b>THANK YOU</b> to everyone who granted <a href="http://libraryh3lp.blogspot.com/2012/01/guess-what-were-four-years-old-today.html">our birthday wish</a>! The Wordle of LibraryH3lp customers is now in place on the <a href="http://libraryh3lp.com/">LibraryH3lp home page</a>. <div><br /></div><div>We gave greater font sizes to those customers who have been with LibraryH3p the longest because we sincerely appreciate the courage of our early adopters. And, without further ado, our Wordle:<div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://libraryh3lp.com/images/keep-it-simple/libraryh3lp-wordle.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="361" src="http://libraryh3lp.com/images/keep-it-simple/libraryh3lp-wordle.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div>Please let us know of any typos. And if you would like to add your library to our Wordle, <a href="mailto:support@libraryh3lp.com">just let us know</a>. We have plenty of room. :-)</div></div></p>

A big THANK YOU to everyone who granted our birthday wish ! The Wordle of LibraryH3lp customers is now in place on the LibraryH3lp home pag...