Houston, Texas is rich with culture, and the Houston Area Digital Archives division of the Houston Public Library works hard to capture the city’s history and make it accessible to all. In that spirit, HPL Cataloging and Metadata Services Librarian Jeanette Sewell recently submitted the digital archival coloring books designs she created.
Jeanette describes her process in creating the covers and pages for the online books:
For volumes 2-7, the covers were created with Canva, the coloring page images with Pixlr, and finally assembled in PowerPoint. Volume 1 was created with Pixlr and Microsoft Word.
I decided to make the first volume to coordinate with #ColorOurCollections, an online event that took place ion February bringing together the collections of archival institutions and repositories with free downloadable coloring pages. The volumes after that were created for a presentation that I recently gave for the Amigos Library Services annual member conference.
I have plans for two more volumes (maybe 3 to make it an even 10!) that I hope to present at some other upcoming conferences.
All of the coloring books can be found here on the digital archives. If you are inspired to color some of the pages (and, seriously, prepare yourself to be sent down a creative rabbit hole when you start clicking through these!), send them along to Jeanette, as she hopes to feature some completed examples in her future presentations!
Librarian Design Share 
June 2, 2016 at 11:20 pm
This is so cool! I shared to the Social Media for Special Collections Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1559342881006313/
I’m wondering if Jeanette has read this blog post: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/02/09/what-colorourcollections-suggests/ before? “…Rick Prelinger of the unique Prelinger Library talked about the need to open up archives and special collections to those who are not members of an elite research community. His talk was followed up by one from Stanford historian, Gordon H. Chang; the key message from both experts being neatly summarized by Chris Bourg of MIT when she tweeted out ‘The humanities are in crisis because we are talking to fewer and fewer people; the answer is to talk to new communities and collaborate.'” This sounds right up her alley!
(^What a librarian thing for me to do. LOL!)
July 13, 2016 at 5:15 pm
Hi Lindsay! Thanks so much for the compliment and for sharing my work! I hadn’t seen that article yet. I’m glad she wrote it and that you shared it. I will reference it on a poster I’m working on about the coloring books. Thanks again! 🙂