I know, more social networks: ugh. This means another workshop to attend about the art of _____ing. Much like Twitter catered to our desires for information but in small-bits-won’t-you,-i-have-a-lot-of-other-things-to-read, Pinterest is a site that fully upholds the wish of the human eye for pretty things. In a nutshell, it’s a virtual bulletin board for you, but people have taken to browsing it like they might browse their Facebook friends pages when they’re bored or distracted. It also already has the giants — the folks with huge amounts of followers, waiting anxiously for the next pretty picture they will pin up.
When I first started using Pinterest, I wanted to suggest to my SAA Student Chapter that we try to incorporate the site somehow. At all of our archival jobs, we find the neatest things — couldn’t we share that? Couldn’t we find a way to share a quick image and get people to see the wonderful things involved in these papers? But there’s copyright, working with institutions most of us are only working for less than 10 hours a week, digitization & scanning, the metadata, so much involved. I let the idea drop — it wouldn’t work for us, not now.
But I’ve been very happy to see in just the last few days that Pinterest is really picking up with museums and other repositories! I really think there is a wealth of possibility here. There is the problem that if you put the identifying information relating to your institution underneath the image, someone else can easily change it. However, when you “repin” a picture, the link to the picture is automatically still traced. Ideally, you can pin a fantastically surreal image of some little girl of the 1840s that everyone will be taken with, and will repin over 400 times — but the link will always go back to your website.
I leave you with four posts I recently read about this new tool:
- ArchivesInfo: Pinterest for Cultural Heritage
- burnsscotland: Pinterest
- Museum Diary: Museums and Pinterest, an Introduction
- Best of 3: Pinterest and Museums
