Thing #7-Content Saving & Sharing

Back again, this time with content saving and sharing!  The idea behind this Thing is getting easy access to things we find and want to save on the internet.  This things hits close to home-I used to have a beautiful collection of bookmarks, organized into folders, on my browser on my main personal computer.  I had bookmarks for professional information, hobbies, sites I frequented in grad school, you name it.  Then my laptop died a horrible death, had to be completely wiped and restored to factory settings.  And I lost Every. Single. One. Of. My. Beautiful. Bookmarks.  And what's worse is that since I had them bookmarked I didn't really even pay attention to what the actual web address was, so I haven't been able to recover most of them.  *sigh*

The content saving and sharing tools we looked at in this section (Pinterest and Bitly) could have saved me from losing my bookmarks, as they store your content on the cloud, so to speak, making it accessible from pretty much any internet connected device.  I chose to create a Pinterest account because just a few weeks ago a coworker had told me she keeps both a personal and professional Pinterest account and has found it to be a great professional tool.  She works in a public library with adults, young adults, and children and uses her Pinterest for everything from ideas for story-time and crafts to book clubs and collection development.

I decided to follow my coworker's lead and create a Pinterest for work-related ideas and information.  I'm part time academic reference librarian and part time public library substitute, so I love having the ability to create an unlimited number of boards for various aspects of public vs. academic librarianship.  The app is very user friendly and it is easy to search for, pin, and organize things.  It was also easy to transition back and forth between web and mobile versions of Pinterest, though I suppose one would expect that from such a popular entity.  I can also see how collaborative and social this app could be-I ran into the pins of several professionals I know from around the country while perusing the pins! Overall, I'd have to say I'm really enjoying using Pinterest.  I've pinned books I'd like to read, statistics, cool library spaces, and much more.  Its been a fun and new (to me) way to engage in the professional field. 

I'm going to end by sharing another cloud bookmarking tool called Delicious that I learned about in grad school (delicious.com, also available as an app for Apple and Android) (and yes, I do realize that had I adopted it back then I would not have lost all my bookmarks on my recent computer crash. Hindsight...always 20/20).  You can bookmark online resources and add your own tags to them to help you describe, organize, and find them (what librarian wouldn't love that?!).  Similar to Pinterest, Delicious lets you ‘follow’ other users and the user’s public resources and tags become viewable by their followers.  Another plus-you can choose to make resources and tags private, which can be tricky to do on other services like Pinterest.  It would another great tool for workplace collaboration. Cheers!