When I taught a course on the history of museums, I found it useful to have a ready source of historical images of exhibitions from the past 500 years of so.

As an experiment, I added Pinterest to my workflow. It’s extremely easy to add an image to a Pinterest board; click a button, correct the caption, and you’re set. And Pinterest makes suggestions, too: other boards with similar images, which makes it easy to explore and find images others have posted, and other “similar images,” which turns out to be a fascinating category of visual search (More on it here.) One can pretty quickly build up a large collection of images this way. Here’s what I’ve got on my “History of Museum Exhibits” board: