Good afternoon. Welcome to my slidecast on Pinterest as An Information Gathering Tool.
My name is Jessica Ieremia and I am currently a graduate student about to receive my master’s degree in Library and Information Science. I work as a public librarian where I use many different search tools to fulfill the information needs of patrons that come through the library each day. These patrons range from small business owners, members of the community to state and federal employees.
Many information professionals work in the field of research by gathering intelligence or information for clients and patrons to fill information gaps, discover up and coming trends and to provide critical business information.
This critical information can be a home chef, business entrepreneur or a client in the food industry that is wondering what flavor and designs will be hot trends in cupcakes. Red Velvet has been widely popular but is it still? What will be the next hot flavor? What are people making, buying and talking about today?
Current popular search methods in gathering information rely on using search engines such as
Google
Bing
Yahoo
and Ask Jeeves
Many information professionals pay fees to have access to scholarly articles through data bases. It can be difficult trying to find current information through scholarly articles because it takes articles after they are written some time to become published.
Blogs are read to discover current trends and uncover what consumers are sharing about products.
Using these information search tools that we just discussed can cause information overload through the amount of noise created in the search results. Internet search engines index hundreds of millions of pages and respond to a massive quantity of search queries each day. When a query is entered into the search box… web pages are then searched that contain the text that was entered in the search box. A number of search results appear that need to be looked through to examine what page has the information we are looking for. This can take up a good amount of time and effort. This slide shows many signs with information on each one and is a classic case of information overload. By glancing over them…… can you quickly find which sign tells the way to Chatanooga? It may take some effort to find the right sign since every sign needs to be browsed through.
An advantage Pinterest hasover search engines is that it helps to decrease information overload by cutting out the noise produced in search results that are not of an individuals interest.It does this by being able to clip together and collect bits of the web that is of interest to you and you get to decide what is worth saving and sharing instead of browsing the web through a search engine like Google or Ping where you have to browse through everything.
As an example, I used two search engines and Pinterst to look for trends in cupcakes. Using Bing I entered cupcake into the search box and I came up with some images, wikipedia and pages to bakeries.
Again using Google, I typed in the same query of cupcake in the search box and my results are pretty similar to Bing minus the photo gallery.
On Pinterest I searched with the same query of cupcake and the results are picture boards of what people are currently posting. I can immediately see that cupcake toppers are a big trend at the moment. From here I am able to link to business and personal sites or continue viewing pictures for creative inspiration. I can also read what people are saying about cupcake toppers and why they like them and how to make them.I want to mention that I also searched the same sites using cupcake trends in the search box and came up with many different articles that would take some time to open up and read through to find what I am looking for.
My message is to bring to your attention that Pinterest is a great research tool to add to your information research tool belt. Using different research tools gives information professionals the ability to successfully fill information gaps for clients and patrons. Go ahead and give using Pinterest a try. Just a forewarning though that you need to request an invitation to Pinterest before you can create a free account and have access. This may take more than a day. Please email me if you have any questions about this presentation.Thank you for listening.
