British Cartoon Archive Digitisation
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This project digitised 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.
Executive Summary
See the British Cartoon Archive
The main aims of the project were to address the physical inaccessibility of the Carl Giles Archive by digitising all the original artwork plus a selection of his personal archive material; to make the digital images available online by integrating the material into the existing catalogue thereby creating the largest digital cartoon archive in the world; to encourage the use and re-use of cartoon-related content for teaching and research purposes by increasing the quality of material freely accessible, and by making the material available for re-use in teaching and research materials.
It was expected that the project would develop knowledge and capacity and outline best practices for this and future projects.
The project was essentially divided into two strands, to:
- augment the British Cartoon Archive’s existing catalogue through the addition of material from the Carl Giles Archive by cataloguing the material and digitising 20,000 items thereby allowing it to be cross-searchable with the 124,000 other images already on the database
- update the existing website and to create a new worldwide cartoon resource and dynamic portal which would provide the public, academics and researchers with resources to facilitate teaching and learning activities as well as to access, examine and share not only cartoon images but other material from the archive; in this case personal material from Giles such as correspondence, photos and fan letters
To achieve the aims and objectives, appropriate databases and software needed to be selected which could support the archival process as well as robust searching and content delivery on the web. It was decided, where possible, to look at open source options in order to leverage the expertise and enthusiasm of the open source communities but that was not always achievable. The eventual software architecture is based on Calm archival software (a proprietary specialist application), Drupal (as the open source content management system to create and maintain the web pages) and Fedora (to provide flexible and robust search capabilities and to deliver the content in Calm to the web using open source software).
By the conclusion of the project a new website at has been created which greatly enhances the searching options. It is now possible for users to search across the archive and get results returning cartoons, alongside other content such as cartoonist biographies, holdings information, archival material and books. The site incorporates Web 2.0 functionality. Users can add comments to pages allowing them to contribute and share information and stories while, at the same time, allowing the BCA to moderate the comments and monitor user interest. Global teaching and learning resources can be created with the grouping feature which is based on traditional lightbox functionality. Through the selection and annotation of groups of cartoons, a user can create teaching resources, virtual exhibitions and thematic groups. E-commerce functionality has also been implemented which, in the first instance, will enable the archive to offer its publications for sale. In particular the catalogue of the Giles exhibition in London which ran from November 2008 – February 2009, Giles on of the Family, was written by the Head of the BCA and contains information on Giles uncovered during the project. Usage of the site, features and user comments will be monitored with the intention of seeking additional grants, either externally or internally, if enhanced functionality is deemed beneficial.
Figures at the start of the project relating to the old database showed that the site had between 30 and 40 visits each day with users completing more than 3,000 searches a month. Statistics for the new website in the last month shows an average of 285 visits each day from 108 different countries and over 4395 searches were performed (see Appendix A).
The high profile of the project has raised awareness of the BCA both internally and externally and has resulted in a number of new projects within the University which will help support the sustainability of the outcomes and outputs of this project. For example, there is a new JISC-funded project, the VERsatile DIgitisation framework project (VERDI), which will allow the BCAD infrastructure to be used to support digital collections across the University and Drupal has been selected as the new content management system for the entire University of Kent website.