Exploring our Collections: The Many Colors of the UNT Digital Library

This 24x7 presentation discusses a combination of outreach initiatives to promote use of digital collection items: #ColorOurCollections and Twitter. #ColorOurCollections is an initiative to promote the use of digital collections to a general audience by encouraging institutions to convert images within their collections into black and white drawings that can be used as coloring pages. These images are then promoted through Twitter via #ColorOurCollections. As many of these collections are viewed primarily as resources for scholarship, advertising images as coloring pages invites more potential digital collection users to increase engagement with held items. Using the #ColorOurCollections initiative, selected items were converted into black and white coloring pages. To further increase their visibility, a twitter bot was created to periodically tweet the images. After the #ColorOurCollections initiative has ended, this bot can be repurposed to advertise other items from the UNT Digital Library, including the institutional repository. This presentation describes the image conversion and twitter bot creation processes.