RA FOR ALL...THE ROAD SHOW!

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Thursday, November 7, 2013

Instagram in Libraries?

This week I have been putting the finishing touches on my brand new Bridging the Physical Virtual Divide talk.

It used to be a 45-60 minute training, but I have turned it into a 2+ hour Keynote talk.  I will be debuting it at the Southeast Pennsylvania Library Association Annual Conference/Meeting in King of Prussia, PA on Tuesday 11/12. That’s right, I’m taking my show on the road.

Interestingly, I have been doing many more webinars or Skype talks [from home] due to my busy schedule and to help libraries save money, but this was an opportunity I could not turn down since it coincides with my grandmother’s 93rd birthday and she lives only 20 minutes away from the meeting site.

I was a bit nervous about turning this shorter talk into a longer address, but over the last month as I have been putting the final touches on the talk, I have to say, it’s been a long time since I have been this excited about a new talk.  It is really coming together well and it has forced me to sit down and think about the choices I have made in my professional career as I branched out to provide virtual RA here on the blog.

Some of you may have noticed that I was getting a bit nostalgic back in August when I had this post.  But no, it was not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, rather it was research for this talk. I normally to not sit back and look at my own success, but I have to say, it was extremely useful that I had to do it for this presentation.

So thanks to SEPLA for forcing me to spend the last couple of months looking inside myself so that I could better serve all of you out there.

One of the areas of virtual RA I looked at was how and if Instagram could be used efficiently and effectively as an RA tool.  Instagram began as just a way to share pictures, but has become a popular social media tool.

I will have a slide talking about Instagram, but just in case that is the only current virtual RA trend you are interested in, rather than make you wade through the entire presentation next week, here are 2 very interesting articles I found on the topic of Instagram in Libraries:

If you are already using Instagram at your library, let me know.  I would love to include you in my presentation. There are so few libraries doing it this right now, that highlighting those using Instagram will help us all.

I will have the slides for the entire Bridging the Physical Virtual Divide program up on RA for ALL by Monday night for everyone to see.

2 comments:

Elizabeth said...

You are probably already aware of this, but Oak Park Public Library used Instagram to keep their patrons in the loop while their lobby was under construction. Their pictures documented the progress of the lobby and also directed patrons where to pick up holds, return books, etc. They also just recently shared photos of their new self check out machines. Very cool.

Sarah Elsewhere said...

We set up an Instagram this summer when we set up our Twitter account, and we do use it occasionally. However, I find that I prefer to upload an image to Twitter directly because then people are able to view it without having to click through a link.

Image tweet: https://twitter.com/Carnegie_Stout/status/396693216763711488

Instagram tweet: https://twitter.com/Carnegie_Stout/status/397384259515981824

More than that though, we're fans of the gif: https://twitter.com/Carnegie_Stout/status/398566989565677570

Do you know of any other libraries experimenting with Vine?