I went to the Cooper Hewitt Museum recently and played around with the Cooper Hewitt digital Pen that you can borrow free with admission. The Pen lets you “collect” specific images from your visit to look at later.

Here’s what the Pen looks like (image from Cooper Hewitt site):

You just click it to a wall tag (just like in the image above) and that artwork is saved to your “collection.”

Your admission ticket has a URL and code on it so you can access your “collection” later.

Here are some examples of what the “collection” images look like, compared to mine. (Images on the left are the Cooper Hewitt’s; images on the right are mine. Not all are the identical items….)

 

 

 

The museum images are better if you want flat, full-object views that are perfectly lit. Mine are better if you want to see the pieces in context or zoom in really close.

The best part is that along with the image itself, the museum provides a wealth of detail about the object, including date, dimensions, who owns it, and similar items in the collection.

Of course what the museum really wants you to do with the Pen is share the images via social media, and each image in your “collection” has links for email, Pinterest, Twitter, and Tumblr.

I hope there are future uses for the Pen (and coordinating website with images) that let you do more — think how useful a resource it could be if from this image in the collection you could get links to other sites with other images, historical background, artist info, and so on.