Beasts in your collections?!

Zeeuws Archief : Asian and African animals, 1770-1780. Cat.nr. HTAM-H-104.

What?!
"NO!", is our first response when people ask: Do you have beasts in your collections or depots? Of course not! We keep our depots very clean and take very good care of our heritage collections! No mice, no spiders, no flies, no rats, no silverfishes, no fleas, no bookworms, we don't give them any chance to creep in our collections and depots.

World fauna in our collections
That's what we think. But... we DO have lots of beasts in our collections and depots! Think of the huge seamonsters on oceanmaps, the very precise drawings of insects in fauna books, the sweet pictures of cats in albums amicorum, the loyal dogs at the feet of our rulers on paintings and sculptures. We have the entire fauna of the world in our collections!

World Animal Day, October 4th
On October 4th each year, we celebrate World Animal Day. Let's dive into our collections to search for colourful fishes. Let's make a safari tour through our depots to catch wild animals. Let's have a stroll through all the bookshelves to discover beautiful insects that hide there. Let's have a great flight through our storagerooms and catch up with some amazing birds. Make a silent tour at night to spot the very rare unicorn. And let's show all the animals we find in our depots and collections to the world on World Animal Day!

Twitter event #heritagebeasts
On October 4th, World Animal Day, Follow An Archive and Ask Archivists will organize a Twitter event: #heritagebeasts. We invite all heritage institutions to join us! So we ask the organizers of Follow A Museum, Follow A Library, Ask A Curator, Follow Heritage to join in and spread the word about #heritagebeasts to your followers!

Join #herigagebeasts at October 4th!
Of course all people are welcome to join the Twitter event #heritagebeasts on October 4th! Create a Twitter account and tweet the beasts in your favourite collection!

Let's have a beastly good World Animal Day on October 4th with the Twitter event #heritagebeasts!

Follow #heritagebeasts
Tweets about "#heritagebeasts"

Who wrote about #archday12?

Lots of archivists, genealogists, librarians, museumworkers wrote about #archday12. Great to read it all! Website community of Dutch and Belgian information professionals Archief 2.0 Dutch weblog De Digitale Archivaris by Christian van de Ven Dutch weblog My Heritage by Denie Dutch weblog Wat Van Waarden Is by Anneke van Waarden-Koets African weblog SABC Media Libraries by SABC Radio Archives Dutch weblog Brabant Bekijken by Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum (Provincial Archives) Dutch weblog Zeeuws Archief by Regionaal Historisch Centrum Zeeuws Archief (Provincial Archives) American weblog Errol A. Adams J.D. M.L.S' blog British website of Balliol College University of Oxford Scandinavian weblog Arkivformidling British weblog Kangarooth by Ruth Jenkins Musings of a librarian-to-be Twimmer trending topics Topsy Twitter profile for followanarchive - search the social web Twittertrends archday12 auf twitter

Let´s celebrate International Archives Day on June 9th!

It´s allmost there again! The greatest day of the year - International Archives Day!

We know it´s on a saturday - but let´s celebrate anyway! Let´s show off our archival holdings, knowledge and services this year. We invite you to tweet your most precious document, your best online services and finest webcontent, the coolest pictures of users socializing and using the collections.

Show us - and the whole twittersphere - what you´re proud of in your archives! Let us know if you´re in - and if you will answer questions from users again.

We´re looking forward to another great Archives Day on the tag #archday12

Valentine's Day 2012 in archives

Archives are full of love stories. So let´s share them for Valentine's Day!

We can find romantic stuff about deep and eternal feelings. Some may involve famous people and some convey the emotions of the everyday man or woman, others could be documents about love, that has gone bad. And the documents probably comes from all parts of society, high and low alike.

When we examine the collections, some of the greatest stories of love may not even involve a man and a woman. “Love” could also be the love of ones children, parents, God, siblings – or the love of a cause, that brings passion and great emontions into the life of an individual.

We believe, that YOUR archive has a lot of amazing stories about one of the most amazing human feelings in its collections. And we encourage you to share them on February 14th.

Put some of your documents of love on Flickr or Picasa, make a video for YouTube, create an album on Facebook… use any platform you like, just tweet about it, using the hashtag #loveheritage.

We hope you will play along – for the love of archives – and invite our colleagues in museums and libraries to join as well. We bet, that they have collections full of love as well!

If you´re joining us and want to share a romatic find or loving item from your collection, please use the comment box of the #AskArchivists blog to write the name and country of your institution, as well as your Twitterhandle.

Charlotte and Anneke