JISC

Visit the Cartoon Archive website

This project will digitise the Carl Giles Archive, the single most important archive of British newspaper cartoons, and a key resource for British political and social history that has never before been open to the public. The collection will become a major part of the existing University of Kent Cartoon Centre, thereby creating the largest archive of cartoons in the UK.

The entire collection of 15,000 cartoon images, with some 5,000 pages of related paperwork, will be made available. The current Cartoon Centre website and searchable catalogue will also be redeveloped to significantly increase its accessibility and usability and bring the metadata of the entire collection inline with current international standards.

Watch a video on the resource

The project

The Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature at University of Kent was established in 1973 and holds the national collection of British social and political cartoons. The Centre's online database is a unique resource, rich in content and fully-accessible. It already represents the work of some 250 British cartoonists and is widely used by academics.

The British Cartoon Archive Digitisation (BCAD) project will address the physical inaccessibility of the Carl Giles Collection, and also provide a simple approach to the time consuming copyright permissions process of putting together teaching materials containing cartoon/visual images. The project is designed to provide the widest possible access to the most important collection of material relating to British newspaper cartooning, thereby vastly increasing the cartoon's widespread "free view" availability. It will also provide use and re-use of the archive content for teaching and research purposes.

The Giles collection will be cross-searchable with the 123,000 other images in the Centre's catalogue. Delivering the digital images in this information-rich environment will ensure the Giles Collection is widely available for research, teaching, and learning. More than 75,000 cartoons already in the Centre's catalogue date from the period covered by the Giles Collection, and over 6,000 of them are by Giles's cartoonist colleagues on the Daily Express and Sunday Express. As part of the project, the Centre's entire catalogue of 138,000 cartoon images will also be brought in line with the JISC standards of accessibility and opened to metadata harvesting.

The content

During his lifetime Giles assembled a vast studio archive of his cartoon images, and some fifteen linear metres of paperwork containing an estimated 75,000 separate documents. After his death in 1995, the studio archive went into storage with the Victoria & Albert Museum until its move to University of Kent in 2006.

Digitisation of the archive will create a catalogue of 7,500 cartoons in which the majority can be accessed in two versions - the original artwork, with markings for the printer, and the final published cartoon. The collection will comprise:

• An archival surrogate, in microfilm and digital form, of the 15,000 original cartoons and cartoon prints within the Giles Archive.
• Metadata for the 7,500 individual published cartoons within this collection, linked to the variant images, plus additional contextual information for the published cartoons.
• An estimated 5,000 digital images of important and representative paperwork from the Giles Archive, illustrating his career as a national newspaper cartoonist.
• The linking of this material to over 123,000 digitised and catalogued cartoons in the Centre's database, by other British cartoonists, with biographies.

The process

Once the images have been digitised they are added to the catalogue and run through a tool that produces three image types: small, medium and large. The images are then associated with Dublin Core metadata and stored, with the XML file produced for each image, in a hierarchical file structure which is parsed at time intervals by an indexing tool. A tool for wiki-style editing of catalogue records allows participation from contributors worldwide.

The future

A new design and layout for the Centre's website will create a worldwide cartoon resource and Wikipedia-style portal which will provide greater access and tools for the existing international academic community. The development of the site, catalogue and services will extend the use of the site to a far larger number of academics, researchers, specialist, and enthusiasts, and build a considerable international community, who will use, share and contribute images, content, and expertise.

The project plan

Download the project plan and final report to find out more about the detail of the project.

Lead site: University of Kent