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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.

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.