JISC

The Cartoon Archive Rapid Digitisation project (CARD) will digitise a further 16,000 cartoon items, covering the two undigitised collections in greatest demand by researchers at the BCA. These two collections will be digitised, catalogued, and delivered online as part of the BCA’s freely-available online catalogue. Incorporating CARD outcomes into this well-established resource will ensure wide useage of the two collections, and, through crosssearching, will greatly enhance their value as digital resources.

The collections to be digitised are the BCA’s modern cuttings collection, comprising 14,500 political cartoons from British national newspapers and magazines between 2003 and 2011; and the Director of Public Prosecutions’ [DPP’s] archive, on permanent loan to the BCA, which records the prosecution for obscenity of 1,300 cartoon seaside postcards between 1951 and 1961. Some 200 prosecuted postcards from the BCA’s own collection will also be digitised to support this material. Demand for these two collections is already high in their undigitised state, and that guarantees both interest in the CARD project, and immediate use of its outcomes.