Use Pinterest to Promote Events & Curate Content for Your Patrons

Submitted by schwarz on

Pinterest is one of the hottest social networks of 2012.  It's a virtual pinboard where you can organize and share images & videos, and browsing others' Pinboards is a fun way to discover new things & get inspiration from people who share your interests. Joe Murphy calls it "Web bookmarking meets photo sharing meets visual to do lists."

Create an account for your library to "curate" content for your library's customers!  Pinterest is currently invite-only, but it's easy-peasy to request an invite from Pinterest or anyone else (like me) who's already using it. Get step-by-step instructions on setting up your account here: How to Get Your Nonprofit Started on Pinterest.

Get inspired by these libraries' boards to promote your library's programs & materials:

Use Conversation to Organize Your Email Messages

Submitted by schwarz on

Outlook 2010 has a new feature that lets you arrange messages by Conversation.

Using this feature, messages that share the same subject appear as Conversations that can be viewed and expanded or collapsed by clicking an con to the left of the Subject line. The messages within each Conversation are sorted with the newest message on top. When a new message is received, the entire Conversation moves to the top of your message list, helping to make tracking email threads much easier than before.

Here's a screenshot of what this looks like in one of my email folders:

Here's how to turn on the Conversations feature:

Convert a Row to a Column in Excel

Submitted by schwarz on

If you've started a spreadsheet and then realized it would make more sense to have the data organized in columns rather than rows (or rows rather than columns), you can use Excel's Transpose function to make it so.

Find out how to do it in Excel 2003, 2007 and 2010 at the illustrated step-by-step instructions at The How-To Geek.

Haven't Read This Month’s Bookclub Book?

Submitted by schwarz on

The article "Discussion points for members who have not read this month’s book" offers a dozen wry ways to fake it through your next book club meeting. 

Here are two of my favorites:

  • "A book’s setting is crucial to establishing mood. If this book had been set in Darfur instead of in Glen Burnie, would you be more likely to have read the whole thing by now? Why or why not?"
  • "In your opinion, is this book fiction or nonfiction? Support your view with examples taken from the jacket copy."

Read all 12 of them all at Ann Hodgman's Shouts & Murmurs column in The New Yorker.

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