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Major collections continue to go online at the University's British Cartoon Archive

Following the recent highly succesful online launch of the largest collection of British social and political cartoons by the British Cartoon Archive (BCA) at the University of Kent, three further collections are to be made available online by the BCA as part of the VERsatile DIgitisation framework project (VERDI) which enables digital collections to be catalogued, searched and presented on the web. The three collections are sporting cartoons by Tom Webster (1886-1962) held by the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent; photographs of Renfrew Orkney Islands Excavations held by the Centre for the History of Archaeology; and the Muggeridge collection of windmills and watermills held within Special Collections at the University's Templeman Library.

The VERDI framework will be of use both to academics already in possession of digital material and to academics who wish to pursue projects involving the digitisation of new material. The University's Information Services has been awarded funding for this project under the Enriching Digital Resources strand of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Digitisation Programme. The project is building upon and generalising the infrastructure and good practice developed under the £1 million JISC-funded British Cartoon Archive Digitisation project (BCAD). Each collection will have its metadata brought up to current standards and all material will be available in digital form.

The framework supports the cataloguing of the items to ISAD(G) standards, the preservation of the best quality digital images, the creation of images suitable for use on websites, and the searching and retrieval of the information via a web interface. Not only will it enable academics to include searching a specific collection or collections on their personal or departmental web pages, but it will also enable the University to offer a federated search across all of its digital holdings.

The project runs until 30 September 2009. Further information can be obtained from the project website at www.kent.ac.uk/is/projects/verdi

Contact: mediaoffice@kent.ac.uk

Story published at 11:24am 4 December 2008