Most librarians track down old works of William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens to expand their collections.
Richard Graham finds comics.
Graham, an assistant professor and media services librarian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, runs the UNL Libraries' Government Comics Collection, an online database of scanned copies of informational comic books produced by government agencies.
The idea for the database started with a display about government-made comics at Northwestern University and the U.S. military's decision to make new comics for its operations in Iraq. This created a renewed interest in government comics among comic book scholars, which inspired Graham to begin researching them.
"It was like a perfect storm of different contributing factors," he said.
Work on the database began in 2007 after Graham received funding from the Undergraduate Creative Activities and Research Experiences Program. Graham started with items in the UNL Libraries government documents collection, which accounts for about half of the database.
The rest of the collection has been compiled from outside sources such as comic book stores and government document collections at other libraries. Graham has received help from other comic collectors and scholars in finding and borrowing comics to expand the database.
"It's something that grows as the word gets out there," he said.
The database currently has more than 180 comics, covering topics from the inner workings of the Federal Reserve System to the history of Apartheid. The majority of the comics in the database were created so government employees and citizens would have easy-to-understand guides on sometimes complex or uninteresting topics, Graham said.
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