#ColorOurCollections Roundup

Posted on February 5, 2016 by nyamhistorymed

By Rebecca Pou, Archivist; Johanna Goldberg, Information Services Librarian; and Anne Garner, Curator
Social Media Team, New York Academy of Medicine Library

#ColorOurCollections week is winding down, but it has been so much fun we want to do it again. We propose making it an annual event for the first week of February.

More than 215 libraries and cultural institutions participated, representing 7 countries (United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand). We’ve been absolutely blown away by the amazing coloring sheets shared by contributors and the range of their sources; coloring selections came from incunables, natural histories, botanicals, children’s classics, anatomical atlases, university yearbooks, patents, and much more. While most of the content came from printed works, manuscripts, sketches, stained-glass windows, plates, and mosaics also provided inspiration. To more fully explore the cornucopia of coloring content, just take a look at the list below.

This document includes images shared by organizations on websites, Pinterest boards, and Flickr and Facebook albums (and is organized by these locations). Many organizations shared #ColorOurCollections images one at a time via Twitter and Instagram. While these are not listed here, they are reflected in our Pinterest board.

We apologize if we inadvertently left your #ColorOurCollections contributions off this list. Please comment below with the organization name and link to your images, and we will update the list accordingly.

Thank you to the institutions that contributed to #ColorOurCollections and to all the talented coloring enthusiasts out there who participated! We hope you enjoyed learning more about our collections. Though the week is nearly over, please keep the submissions coming. With the amount of colorable content released this week, it is safe to say we can keep coloring until next year!

#ColorOurCollections February 1-5

Posted on January 6, 2016 by nyamhistorymed

As you may know by now, there is a coloring craze going on. And we want libraries and their patrons to join in the fun!

Inspired in part by a recent twitter exchange with the Biodiversity Heritage Library, we are starting a week-long special collections coloring fest on social media, using the hashtag #ColorOurCollections. There is so much great coloring content in special collections, especially when looking at early illustrated books meant to be colored by hand.

Collections Care Assistant Emily Moyer and Archivist Rebecca Pou #ColorOurCollections.

If you work in a library or special collection, share images from your collections and invite followers to share their colored copies from February 1-5. You could use images already online in your digital collections, or you could even create easily printable coloring sheets or a coloring book, which we did a few years ago.

If you are a coloring fan, grab those colored pencils and felt-tip markers and #ColorOurCollections, then share your results using the hashtag.

Camel from Conrad Gesner’s Historia Animalium, Liber I, 1551.