Tweet the NY Public Library an emoji and it’ll tweet back a pic from its archives

Today in Fun With Bots, we take a look at @NYPLEmoji, a bot by the New York Public Library, which responds to emojis tweeted at it by fans with startlingly similar photos from the library’s public image collection.
It’s awesome.

👯 https://t.co/3eQppa1Xsq

— NYPL Emoji Bot (@NYPLEmoji) August 14, 2016

The bot queries the library’s digital collection, which has more than 691,000 digitized images. It finds the one that most closely resembles the emoji, and tweets back the image. Sometime the bot just picks emojis itself and finds good photos to pair with them.

☝ https://t.co/jcTGQFKC1u

— NYPL Emoji Bot (@NYPLEmoji) August 8, 2016

The bot is the work of Lauren Lampasone, a digital producer at the NYPL, and Leonard Richardson, a software architect there.
https://twitter.com/lolibrarian/status/761007103498711040
One of the problems libraries are facing in this increasingly digital world is how to remain relevant and useful with younger people. Emojis and bots? Nailed it.

Made a CBDQ bot with @lolibrarian. Send it an emoji & it shows you a representative image from NYPL's collection. https://t.co/6lmKssIrVd

— Leonard Richardson (@leonardr) August 4, 2016