Pinterest as a library marketing and information literacy tool

Sorry, I know I am behind on my 23 things! I have downloaded Jing and Audacity and will hopefully get to play them them in depth soon.

Lately I have been involved with a project using Pinterest to create useful resources for staff, parents, and students. The library I work for is an elementary school library and runs its catalog on the intranet. As such, it is hard to reach users at home. In order to make the library more accessible I decided to use Pinterest as it is a great visual medium and provides an easy way to bookmark various resources. In order to advertise the school's Pinterest page, it is regularly included in the school's news bulletin with a brief description to inform staff and parents of the new resource available for them.

To get the ball rolling I began by creating new material boards based on materials, language, reading levels, and type (i.e. fiction and non fiction). This was a great way to ease myself and new users of Pinterest to the library. It also made great use of the visual side of Pinterest to show off our new materials to our collection.

On the side I started to create secret boards of great Homework Help websites for K-6. I wanted a good grouping of resources before I made the board publicly available. An easy way to begin such a collection is to use what you already have. I did this by perusing the saved favorites already available through the library. I then added resources that I collected through my own research. This included other great websites with homework help pages, subject searches,  and of course ALA's Great Websites for Kids website. I made sure to only include free online resources so that anyone could use them.

I am also working on a board for websites and tools for teachers to introduce them to cool online tools and resources that might be of interest and helpful to them. This board is not very developed yet as I have been focusing more of the Homework Help page to get it established. There are so many great free resources for teachers (and librarians!), its wonderful. I love discovering them.

As you can tell I love this project! I really love online resources, tools, and media. So this project is something I'm really passionate about!

Have any great resources I should know about? Please share them with me!