A Pinterest Artifact Board

I’ve been on Pinterest for while now.  Long enough that the early thrill of madly pinning stuff had worn off. Recently, I’ve mainly been using it as my morning . . .and break time . . . and evening . . . dose of eye-candy, taking quick scan through the images that the people I follow have been saving.

But Pinterest seems to have achieved some kind of critical mass in the last month or two, at least judging by the number of new people who have followed me and the increasing number of how-to articles and “finally succumbed” references I’m seeing.

I’d read a couple of people’s ideas about how Pinterest might be used in PR, including for cultural organizations and museums, but nothing was really clicking for me until this week.  Recently, though, I’ve been checking out Melissa Mannon’s ongoing project to create a crowd-sourced board about archivists, and just yesterday I followed a twitter link to NEMA’s impressive (and apparently brand-spanking-new) collection of boards on New England museums.

So, this morning, when I ran across a cool, vivid pink, end of the 19th century, designer evening gown that I liked, I changed my pattern.  Instead of debating whether to repin it to “my style” (I like it a lot, but not sure I’d want to wear it) or “old” (admittedly a catch-all for anything of that description that doesn’t fit another category) I created a board called “cool stuff from museums.” If nothing else, maybe it will remind the other users that see it that these images of neat things don’t magically appear out of the maw of the internet (or Photoshop), but represent real items in actual physical collections somewhere.

The way Pinterest works, I can designate other users to add to this board, but I need to know their Pinterest IDs; I can’t just make it open to anyone. (Or at least, if I can, I don’t know how.) So if you have some cool museum artifacts to add, just let me know and I’ll designate you an editor.

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