Pinterest for Reader’s Advisory

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Social media, in particular Pinterest, can be a great addition to  the traditional reader’s advisory methods used in libraries.

At Waitaki District Libraries we’ve recently started incorporating Pinterest as a reader’s advisory tool. As more and more people access library services from home, we feel it’s important to provide reader’s advisory services online too.

If you’re not familiar with Pinterest, it’s like an online bulletin board. You create different boards according to your interests and then you can ‘pin’ different content on them. For example we have genre boards like ‘Australian Rural Romance’ ‘Sexy Books’ and ‘Dystopian Books’. We can then pin items from the library catalogue to the relevant boards. Here’s the link to our library Pinterest account if you want to check it out.

Be sure to only pin book titles that you know your library holds. You can install a pin it button into your browser to make it super simple to add pins from websites you’re browsing.

Pinterest is a great way to streamline the combined book knowledge of staff and provide an online source for patrons to browse. One thing to note is that you have to have a Pinterest account to browse the boards. This can limit some patrons but is a compromise that I think is worth it.

If your library doesn’t have social media or you don’t feel comfortable using technology, there are websites like What shall I read next?  where you input the title and author of a book you liked and it gives you suggestions of other books you may enjoy. This can help you to incorporate technology in your reader’s advisory interactions without the commitment of signing up to social media platforms.

We’d love to know if your library uses social media for reader’s advisory! Leave a comment below or tweet me @JuliadeRuiter.

 

 

 

 

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