One of the nice side effects of having one of my photos picked up and used in a report on food security in the face of climate change was that I came across Scoop.it for the first time. And I am glad I did because I instantly fell in love with it. Scoop.it is essentially an online curation tool that enables users to aggregate links in one place to produce an interesting and attractive looking ‘magazine’. I’ve certainly been impressed with the results and can see this as something that I will use extensively in the future.

As part of my involvement in Voices for the Library, I like to investigate new tools, see if they help us to get the message out there and see if they help promote what it is we do. We have employed a variety of tools with varying degrees of success over the course of the past year (although, not glaring errors spring to mind) but, for me, the important thing is to try things out and see if they work. If they don’t, well you learn from that experience and use that to the fullest advantage. Most of the tools we employ are free so there is nothing lost in engaging in a little experimentation. And, to be quite honest, experimenting with new tools is one of the things I get a kick out of (believe me, when you are dealing with the current situation facing public libraries you cling to anything that can help you plough through it).

Scoop.it is really easy to set up. You just sign-up with your Facebook or Twitter accounts (Twitter in our case) and then get curating. You have two options when signing up: basic (ie free) or business ($79 per month). Obviously the latter is not really an option for us so I went with the basic account. Once you set up your account you are given the option of creating a ‘topic’. You can then add a title for your ‘topic’, a short description, language, keywords and even an icon (see image below). The keywords option is particularly useful as it allows Scoop.it to suggest relevant links once your ‘topic’ is created.

Creating a topic

After creating a topic you are then given an opportunity to add a bookmarklet to your browser toolbar. This is really useful as it enables you to bookmark items with ease at just a click of the mouse. Of course, you can also add URLs manually if the need arises, but obviously the bookmarklet will always be first choice.

Adding the bookmarklet

Once the bookmarklet is added you can then choose which social networks you wish to connect with your Scoop.it page. At the time of writing you can connect it to Twitter, Facebook (both Profiles and Pages), Tumblr, LinkedIn and WordPress. At present I only have it linked to Twitter and Tumblr as a Facebook connection required linking to my personal Facebook page which I was not comfortable with (although there are admittedly no obvious concerns about doing this if you choose to do so).

The dashboard (click the image to find out more about the different sections).

Once you have added your bookmarklet and connected your accounts you can then start curating content. To bookmark an item you just click the bookmarklet on your toolbar and a bookmarking window appears on the right-hand side of the screen:

Curating bookmarks

When the bookmarking window appears it automatically pulls the title, any images and a short extract of the text (which you can change). You also have the option of which ‘topic’ you wish to send the bookmark to and which connected networks you wish to share it with (sharing via Twitter presents a short window of editable text to adapt the tweet as you wish). Once you hit publish it gets sent straight to your magazine which, after curating a few links, should look something like this:

Bookmarks are displayed from most recent to earliest but you can move the boxes around in any way you see fit. The boxes also have ‘share’ icons on them so readers can share the links on other social networks.

When posts are pushed to Twitter, however, they are not done so with a link directly to the article. Instead they post a link which takes the reader to your magazine homepage which then allows them to either visit the page they were interested in initially, or they can scan around the page for other items of interest. I quite like this function as, although it could be annoying to be sent to a different page, it does present the user with a range of similarly themed stories.

Clicking the link on Twitter sends users to your topic page, highlighting the referenced article

As well as all this, there are some pretty cool little widgets you can embed on your sites, like this one that scrolls through your shared links. Overall, I am quite impressed and I think this could be a very useful tool both in general and in terms of Voices for the Library. I guess the question is, will I still be using this in six months time? For the moment, I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t.

You can check out our Scoop.it pages here:

UK Public libraries in the news

The value of librarians

Voices for the Library in the news