The RSLP CartoonHub Project is designed to establish a national hub for research into British cartoons and caricature, based initially on the major collections of the four institutional partners. The management of the project is led by the University of Kent at Canterbury, and the Project Director is Margaret Coutts, Director of Information Services and Librarian at UKC.
The RSLP CartoonHub Project has a Project Steering Committee of academics and librarians, a Project Management Group representing the managers and cataloguers of all four partners, and a CartoonHub User Group, working as an email forum, to advise on the delivery of the results.
CartoonHub will constitute the largest archive of cartoon images on the web. The RSLP CartoonHub Project involves the scanning of 43,000 images, covering a hundred and fifty years of British cartooning and caricature. These images are now catalogued and fully accessible from the central CartoonHub website.
JRULM is contributing 1,000 cartoons and caricatures from the Tabley Collection, extending CartoonHub back to the eighteenth century. NLW is adding almost 5,500 cartoons by Leslie Illingworth, published in the Daily Mail and in Punch between 1939 and 1969. From its David Low collection the BLPES is also contributing more than 9,000 cartoons covering Low’s entire career from 1904 to 1963.
UKC is adding some 4,000 cartoons by W.K. Haselden, cartoonist of the Daily Mirror from 1904 to 1940, and almost 5,500 cartoons by Joseph Lee, published in the London Evening News between 1934 and 1950. UKC has also rescanned some 18,000 images from its existing online database, to bring their quality up to that of the other CartoonHub images.
The images on CartoonHub are being indexed and catalogued in line with the existing database of the UKC Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature. Cataloguing uses the UKC cartoon thesaurus, whose broader terms map back to LCSH, but which was specially developed for this type of material.
The UKC database retrieval software has been adapted to accept MARC-tagged records from CartoonHub partners, and cross-platform retrieval using Z39.50 has been explored. The stored images can be viewed in three forms: thumbnails, reference views, and high-resolution images. Electronic watermarks have been added to all the high-resolution images, to protect their copyright and ensure the continuing support of the rights owners.
Work on CartoonHub began in August 1999. The project total of 43,000 cartoons has now been scanned or rescanned by the CartoonHub partner institutions, and 25,000 catalogue records have been created.
The CartoonHub is designed to continue expanding after the first stage of funding, with the further addition of material by partner institutions, and the recruitment of new partners. The UKC has already started a scanning and cataloguing project, funded by the AHRB, that will raise the total number of images in CartoonHub to some 125,000 by the year 2004, making it an unparalleled resource for visual historical research.
Tel: +44 (0)1227 827138
Fax: +44 (0)1227 823127
E-mail: N.P.Hiley@ukc.ac.uk
http://library.kent.ac.uk/cartoons/
Content: Gill Davenport
Last updated 5 July 2002