Today after general sessions ended I headed north to Ohio State University to the Cartoon Research Library where a group of ASIS&T visitors was given a tour by the library’s founding curator Lucy Caswell.
The archive contains over 250,000 original cartoons and focuses primarily on printed cartoon art. Lucy was kind enough to take our group into the stacks and show us drawer after drawer of original cartoons, talked at length about their collections, and told the group all about their collection of Japanese Comics (manga).
Two things that she spoke about really connected with me. . ..First – she talked about the value that their biographical database and specialized metadata brings for their researchers. Second, when comparing her library against more traditional archives she said “we approach things a bit differently – we keep it all.” The picture below shows just how much they keep. There were rows of compact shelving, banks of vertical cabinets, and boxes upon boxes of newly acquired materials. . . If nothing else, this library gets the credit for most colorful stacks ever.
I would have loved to tour this collection. Was the collection more comic strips or editorial cartoons?
It seemed like they had a good balance of both. Apparently there is also a large comic book archive at Michigan & Lucy commented that they collaborated with Michigan to make sure that they didn’t collect similar materials. The top photo in this post shows a cabinet of 3X4 (foot) proofs of the comics for newspapers that had been mounted to prepare for printing.
That might be the first time Michigan and Ohio State collaborated on ANYTHING!
I agree with Lynn that this could be the first time OH and MI and it did not end up in a fight. This collection is something that we talked about in my Special Collections Class. I am with Susan I would love to see it.
How do they ever retrieve anything from it? Wow, what a challenge.
The comic book collection is at Michigan State, not Michigan University, which might explain the lack of open hostility with Ohio State. About ten years ago I read that Michigan State had at least one copy of over half of all comic books ever published in English. I would guess that they’ve increased that percentage in the intervening years.
I’d love to see this one day!
I think this would be a great place to work! (Even if it is in Ohio. Go Blue!)