In January 2016 my colleagues and I worked together to promote the public domain release of over 180k images in our digital collections. I created some content but also started thinking about other ways to not only highlight weird and wonderful images in the collection, but to engage others in making their own discoveries. I already spent a part of my day combing the collection for blog-worthy gems, so I had a sense of what was there, but also recognized the difficulty of finding ways in. Taking a list of current emoji characters, we attemped to match each one with an image from the collection.

That summer we released Version 1 of @NYPLEmoji using cheapbotsdonequick.com. Version 2 is still posting images and is archived on GitHub.

At the end of that summer some of my enterprising, creative, and talented colleagues made it into a four-volume private pressing reference work! *HEART EYES*