British Cartoon Archive Digitisation Project - BCAD

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The British Cartoon Archive Digitisation (BCAD) Project - was part of phase two of the Digitisation Programme funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to unlock a wealth of unique, hard-to-access material creating a critical mass of rich, permanent digital resources for the benefit of the widest user base possible within UK further and higher education.

This project has led to the digitisation of the Carl Giles Archive, the single most important archive of British newspaper cartoons, and a key resource for British political and social history that hasn't been open to the public before. The collection has become a major part of the existing University of Kent British Cartoon Archive, and has created the largest archive of cartoons in the UK.

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

In September 2009 the University of Kent was awarded funding for the VERsatile DIgitisation framework project (VERDI) under the Enriching Digital Resources strand of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Digitisation Programme to extend the architecture to allow other digital collections to be made accessible.

The website at www.cartoons.ac.uk was launched in November 2008.

The project ran from March 2007 to March 2009.

Project documents

Documents are PDF format and require Acrobat Reader to view them.

Project press and media coverage

Project links

Contact details for the project

Project Director

Dr Nicholas Hiley
Head of the British Cartoon Archive
Templeman Library
University of Kent
Canterbury
Kent CT2 7NU

Telephone: 01227 827138
Email: N.P.Hiley@kent.ac.uk