2020 Poster Sessions
Color Your Collection :
Sea Monsters from the 16th and 17th Century

 

Intended Audience

Public Libraries, Academic Libraries, Special Services Departments


Poster Summary and Objectives

#ColorOurCollections is a free resource created by the New York Academy of Medicine to enable library archives and special collections to creatively share their images and illustrations to new audiences. During my MLIS internship at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg library, I worked with the Briggs Collection of rare 16th to 19th century Ichthyology and natural history books to identify images and create a coloring book. In my poster presentation, I will present what I learned from this process: 1) What is #ColorOurCollections, 2) How to Create the Coloring Book, and 3) How to Use the Coloring Book to promote your library.

With the #ColorOurCollections template a library can customize their coloring book as a great way to generate worldwide awareness of their collection. Not every image is appropriate and I will discuss the relevant technical details about how to create a coloring book as well as how to manage the associated copyright issues. Once the coloring book is created, the fun can start. The USFSP library hosted a coloring event, distributed the coloring book in student orientations, as gifts to donors, and created an exhibit in their special collections. With a coloring book, people who may otherwise have never interacted with a library’s archival collection are now able to engage and have fun with the collection.

My poster will include colorable images from the Briggs Collection and the title page of the coloring book. I will also provide attendees a handout with information on the #ColorOurCollections process, including the details for online submission, image from the USFSP coloring book, and a link to view our coloring book when it is available online in January of 2020. I will also have a few copies of the coloring book itself for participants to view.

 

Presenter

Meagan Magee- University of South Florida Nelson Poynter Memorial Library

  • My prior experience in the subject comes from my 2019 summer internship with the University of South Florida St Petersburg, Nelson Poynter Memorial Library. In this position, I made a special collections coloring book by searching the Briggs special collection for usable images from the hundreds of books in the collection. I then used Photoshop to sharpen the images and created a template for the final product which is still used by USFSP to market the library and archival collections in a variety of ways. I oversaw this project from start to finish, and will continue to oversee it as it is uploaded to the website http://library.nyam.org/colorourcollections/ where it will be shared globally for others to discover and color.