AAEC Editorial Cartoon Digital Collection

This week, I looked at the AAEC Editorial Cartoon Digital Collection, a project of the University of Southern Mississippi to digitize their collection of American editorial cartoons dating from 1782 to 1980.

Selection Decisions: The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) decided to digitize this collection because of the value of editorial cartoons for scholarly research in history, art, sociology, and journalism. Therefore, they have digitized their entire collection on the basis of use, acknowledging that digitization is not a viable preservation technique.

Metadata: USM Libraries utilize the Contentdm system to manage their digital collections. Therefore, they already have an organizational basis for housing plenty of metadata information using Dublin Core standards. They provide all necessary information for the cartoons, including title, creator, publisher, date published, date digitized, subject, and many more. The collection's website provides thorough information regarding the technical metadata, specifying all of the specifics of image capture and storage (each image has a TIFF master file, but the access files are in the form of 24-bit JPEG compressed images).

Digital Object Characteristics: While it is not possible to enlarge the digital images of the AAED collection, the images are of a very high quality, with all meaningful elements of the image being readily and clearly recognizable. They are also very quickly and easily accessed.

Intended Audience: The intended audience for this project is anyone interested in historical, cultural, sociological or political research, especially scholarly researchers and students. These editorial cartoons are a great resource for researchers to gain an understanding of reactions to political situations over the past 200 years.