In 2011-12, at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now Science History Institute) in Philadelphia, I was wrestling with a problem that sounds obvious now: we had extraordinary collections, but most of the public would never encounter them if discovery had to begin inside an institutional catalog.

An emerging-media strategy I was developing that year asked a deceptively simple question: What is currently in our collection, and how can we share it with our audience? Two experiments around the Donald F. Othmer collections helped answer it. One used Pinterest to surface a set of ballooning postcards. The other used Flickr, supported by a short YouTube video, to turn an unusual collection of ceramic Christmas cards into a daily public story.

Ballooning postcards on Pinterest

The ballooning postcards came from the Donald F. Othmer Papers in the Othmer Library. They are wonderfully visual objects: hand-drawn images of balloons, airships, early aircraft, and imagined flying machines collected in a 1909 scrapbook. One surviving example, Ballon sphérique, is a watercolor postcard showing a spherical hot-air balloon; the Science History Institute now provides the image with full archival description and a downloadable file.

I worked on this project with longtime CHF archivist Andy Mangravite. Andy was wonderful to work with and enthusiastically embraced the chance to make these collections publicly accessible. That mattered. The technical act of putting an image online was relatively simple. The more interesting institutional question was whether an archive should wait for someone to know what to search for, or actively create new routes into the collection.

Pinterest was a natural fit. Its visual-board structure let the postcards operate as a collection in public rather than as isolated illustrations attached to catalog records. People could browse them because they were beautiful, strange, funny, historically interesting, or simply because they liked balloons. They did not need to arrive already knowing Donald Othmer’s name, a collection number, or the vocabulary an archivist might use to describe early aviation.

Contemporary Pinterest description

24 Pins
This collection of hand-painted postcards featuring balloons and dirigibles illustrates the progression of aeronautics from 1670 to 1909. Chemical engineer Donald Othmer and his wife, Mildred, originally collected these postcards during their travels to France. Follow our board to learn more about chemistry’s role in flight, and please repin these rare images to share!

Science History Institute / Chemical Heritage Foundation Pinterest board

The board still survives under the Science History Institute name. Even better, many of the postcards now live in the Institute’s digital collections with archival metadata, rights information, citations, and downloadable images. What began as a social-media route into the archive now also has a more durable institutional home.

Ceramic Christmas cards on Flickr

The second experiment started with a very different kind of Othmer material. Donald and Mildred Othmer had a long tradition of sending holiday greetings to friends around the world. After commissioning a custom ceramic plate during a trip to Japan in 1960, they continued the idea for the next 28 years, creating annual ceramic Christmas cards with a design on the front and a message on the back.

The collection had a built-in publishing rhythm. Rather than putting the whole set online at once, we used Flickr for a daily reveal leading up to Christmas. Each plate became an episode in a small serialized story.

I produced a short video to provide the context that individual images could not carry on their own. Museum director Jennifer Landry tells the story of Donald and Mildred Othmer, their travels, their correspondence, and the origins of the plates. The video explains that the Othmers sent annual Christmas and New Year greetings to between 700 and 900 people around the world and that the ceramic-card tradition continued for nearly three decades.

The platforms were different because the collections were different. Pinterest supported thematic visual browsing. Flickr supported a serial image campaign. YouTube supplied narrative context. The underlying practice was the same: match the collection to a public behavior rather than forcing the public to behave like a catalog user.

Before GLAM-Wiki, I was already trying to get collections out of the catalog

These projects now look like a small but important predecessor to the GLAM-Wiki work I began at CHF the following year.

Internal CHF documentation from the period is revealing. Pinterest was described as a place for “thematic visuals in Pin Boards”—with ballooning named as an example—and as a campaign tool for concentrating attention around collection themes. Flickr was described as a home for public-event images and selected collection material. In other words, we were already differentiating platforms by what kinds of public encounters they enabled rather than treating “social media” as one undifferentiated thing.

That experimentation was early enough to be worth noting. A January 2013 independent survey of Philadelphia museums found Pinterest in use at only 21 percent of the institutions surveyed, while Flickr was much more established at 64 percent. The point is not that CHF was first. It is that we were testing these platforms as collection-access environments while their institutional uses were still being worked out.

Pinterest and Flickr expanded discovery, but they remained commercial platforms. They could make collection objects visible and shareable, but they did not fundamentally change the relationship between an institution and the public knowledge systems around it.

GLAM-Wiki did.

In 2013, I created CHF’s GLAM-Wiki initiative and hired Mary Mark Ockerbloom as Wikipedian in Residence. The question had evolved from How do we show people more of what is in the collection? to How do we put collections and expertise into the places where public knowledge is actually being created and reused?

By spring 2014, that program had contributed 329 images to Wikimedia Commons. Pages using CHF images received about one million views in January 2014 alone; the project also created or substantially improved hundreds of Wikipedia articles and brought staff and public participants into workshops and edit-a-thons. Those figures belong to the later GLAM-Wiki program, not to the Pinterest or Flickr campaigns, but they show how quickly the underlying access question was expanding from social visibility toward open reuse.

Read the recovered GLAM-Wiki case study →

From visibility to public knowledge

The progression seems clearer from a distance:

Catalog → Pinterest and Flickr → GLAM-Wiki → public knowledge infrastructure.

That does not mean Pinterest and Flickr were primitive versions of Wikimedia. They solved a different problem. The social platforms demonstrated that collections could travel, that visual material could generate discovery outside the institution, and that interpretation could be shaped around the way people actually used a platform.

GLAM-Wiki pushed the idea further. Instead of asking the public to visit another institutional channel, we began placing authoritative images, citations, and expertise inside a shared knowledge system where other people could reuse them.

What the engagement record actually shows

I have not recovered campaign-level view, repin, favorite, or Flickr-set totals for these two Othmer experiments, so I am not going to manufacture them. The surviving evidence is contextual rather than campaign-specific.

An independent January 2013 survey of 33 Philadelphia museums found that only 7 institutions—21 percent—were using Pinterest, while Flickr was already in use at 64 percent. A separate CHF site-audit and analytics report found that, compared with traffic from other social networks, Flickr referrals tended to produce higher time on site and lower bounce rates. That does not prove the Christmas-card campaign itself caused deeper engagement, but it does show that CHF was evaluating these channels in terms of the quality of audience behavior, not simply follower counts.

The strongest outcome evidence remains the trajectory: the ballooning material now has durable digital-collection records, CHF formalized Pinterest and Flickr as distinct collection-outreach tools, and the experiments sit immediately before the much better documented move into GLAM-Wiki and open public knowledge.

The continuity is not the platform. It is the question underneath all of them: How do you make institutional knowledge more accessible without stripping away the context that makes it meaningful?

Toolkit: getting collections beyond the catalog

1. Start with material that has a reason to travel. Visual appeal, surprise, narrative, personality, or relevance can create an entry point that catalog metadata alone cannot.
2. Match the platform to the collection. The ballooning postcards benefited from thematic browsing; the Christmas plates benefited from serial publication and video context.
3. Publish interpretation, not just images. A digital object without provenance or explanation can become detached from the knowledge that gives it value.
4. Use cadence deliberately. A daily reveal created anticipation around the Christmas plates instead of treating digitization as a one-time dump.
5. Work with the people who know the collection. The collaboration with Andy Mangravite mattered because public access worked best when archival knowledge and digital experimentation were working together.
6. Preserve beyond the social platform. Commercial platforms change. The strongest outcome is when material eventually has a durable institutional or open-knowledge home.
7. Move from reach to reuse. Visibility is useful. Public knowledge becomes more durable when people can cite, contextualize, teach with, and build upon collection material.

Project Catalog CardView the record, evidence & surviving materials

Artifact	Othmer Ballooning Postcards + Othmer Ceramic Christmas Cards
Institution	Chemical Heritage Foundation, now Science History Institute
Period	2012–2013
Role	Digital strategy and production. I worked with archivist Andy Mangravite on opening collection material to public discovery and produced the introductory video for the ceramic Christmas-card campaign. Andy was wonderful to work with and enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to make these collections publicly accessible.
Platforms	Pinterest: Othmer Ballooning Postcards. Flickr: Othmer Ceramic Christmas Cards daily reveal. YouTube: interpretive video introducing the ceramic-card story.
Collections	Donald F. Othmer Papers and related Othmer archival and museum material
Experiment	Use platform-native publishing to move visually rich collection material beyond the institutional catalog while retaining enough metadata, interpretation, and provenance to make the objects meaningful.
Evidence / engagement	Campaign-specific Pinterest and Flickr totals have not been recovered. Contemporary context shows Pinterest in use at only 7 of 33 surveyed Philadelphia museums in January 2013; CHF analytics also found Flickr referrals tended to have higher time on site and lower bounce rates than referrals from other social networks.
What survives	The Science History Institute Pinterest board; the ceramic Christmas-card YouTube video; current Science History Institute digital-collection records; internal strategy and publishing documentation; and the later GLAM-Wiki evidence.
What changed	Pinterest and Flickr changed as public platforms, and institutional social-media strategies moved on. The underlying problem—how to bring collections into public discovery without losing context—remained.
Trajectory	Catalog → Pinterest / Flickr → GLAM-Wiki → public knowledge infrastructure
Status	Recovered / published retrospective

Supporting Documents & Surviving SourcesView reports, source material & related evidence

• Othmer Ballooning Postcards — surviving Science History Institute Pinterest board
• The Story Behind the Othmer Ceramic Christmas Cards — video produced by Jeff Guin
• Donald F. Othmer Papers — Science History Institute Digital Collections
• Ballon sphérique — representative 1909 ballooning postcard with archival metadata and downloadable image
• GLAM-Wiki use case for cultural heritage institutions — the next stage of the trajectory
• CHF Social Media Platforms Overview — surviving internal document that distinguishes Pinterest as a thematic campaign tool and Flickr as a repository for public events and selected collection objects.
• Philadelphia Museums: 2013 Video and Social Media Rankings — independent January 2013 benchmark showing the relative adoption of Flickr and Pinterest among Philadelphia cultural institutions.
• GLAM-Wiki program report / Wikipedian in Residence documentation — surviving evidence for the later move from social distribution to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia as public knowledge infrastructure.

Archive Note / ProvenanceView what survives, what changed & how this record was reconstructed

The ballooning-postcard Pinterest board survives under the Science History Institute account, and individual postcards are now represented in the Institute’s Digital Collections with archival metadata and downloadable files. The ceramic Christmas-card campaign was published through Flickr and introduced through the surviving YouTube video above. A stable URL for the original Flickr set has not yet been recovered, so that portion of the record rests on the surviving video and internal documentation.

The later GLAM-Wiki program is documented separately on Voices of the Past and in surviving CHF records. Together, these artifacts show a shift from using social media to increase collection visibility toward placing cultural material in shared public knowledge infrastructure.