A grant by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has enabled the BCA to digitise the Carl Giles archive, the single most important archive of British newspaper cartoons, and a key resource for British political and social history, as well as giving the BCA the opportunity to update its website to significantly increase its accessibility, usability and teaching-related resources.
All the content has been moved and updated. All of our cartoon images have been migrated and can now be viewed with some exciting functionality like the ability to examine cartoons with zoom technology.
The existing database will remain for the time being although content has been frozen as of 5 November and will no longer be updated.
Archive Holdings of Cartoonists By clicking on cartoonists you will be able to see a list of those cartoonists whose work is held by the British Cartoon Archive, either in the form of original artwork or cuttings.
Questionnaire: Please take a few moments to fill in the questionnaire. Thanks
Remote editing: The editing facility is designed to permit users to contribute to the content of the cartoon records. For instance researchers can add comments to the cartoons; teachers can add notes for their pupils; authors can add information about how cartoons were used in their publications; cartoon enthusiasts can add information about cartoonists; cartoonists can add anecdotal comments on their cartoons; and indexers can contribute additional keywords and identify people depicted in the cartoons. The catalogue is very big, and there are many records which have very little information in them, so there is plenty that could be added!
All contributions will be moderated. Editors will be acknowledged on each cartoon, and they may also include a link to their personal details as provided in the registration form.
This is the online database of the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent (formerly known as the Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature). It is free to use, and is maintained by the University as a research tool for academics and others interested in the history of British political and social cartooning.
This database is principally a guide to the British Cartoon Archive's holdings of cartoon cuttings and original artwork. It contains more than 120,000 catalogued cartoons, mostly from the last hundred years. It is the largest cartoon database in the world, but still represents only a fraction of the archive.
The vast majority of these cartoons come from the British Cartoon Archive's collections, but extra material has been added from the collections of the National Library of Wales, the Special Collections Library at the London School of Economics, and from the Tabley Collection at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.
The British Cartoon Archive has added cataloguing and contextual information to the cartoons, but the database is consulted by thousands of academics and researchers, many of whom have detailed specialist knowledge. In 2006 the Archive recognised this expertise by enabling users to edit the database themselves.
If you find any mistakes in the cartoon records, or you are able to add some contextual information, or can identify a person, then you can edit the cartoon records yourself. If you want to become an editor then you first need to register, this is quick and only needs to be done once. There are some tips for editing which editors may find useful.
You can perform straightforward searches by typing search terms into the search box at the top of this page. If you type more than one word into the simple search box then the words will be treated as individual search terms and you will retrieve the cartoons that contain all the words.
The matching records are returned in date order and you can preview them in pages of 12. The preview images are links to the records containing the full catalogued details and a larger image. If you click on the image within one of these records it will display the full sized image; these are usually too large to display as a whole but can be useful for seeing detail. These images are watermarked.
If using combinations of simple intuitive search terms is not finding the cartoons you want then you can restrict your search to records that have words in specified fields (the caption for example), restrict your search by publication date, or search for cartoons indexed by particular subject keywords or depicting named personalities. The easiest way to do this is to use the search wizard – just click on the Wizard button.
The text and images on the database are covered by copyright, and permission is required for any re-use.
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