About 70,000 cartoons and items related to them are now available online from Ohio State’s collection.
OSU’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum has opened a new database to make it easier to access a portion of one of the world’s largest collections, said Lucy Caswell, museum curator and professor.
“Even though we have between 60,000 and 70,000 records in this database, it really is the tip of the iceberg,” Caswell said.
More than 400,000 original cartoons exist in the collection.
The collections are worth millions of dollars, Caswell said.
“In some ways they are priceless,” she added, because the art is original and could never be replaced.
The library and museum already had a database.
“We had a homegrown database for probably 15 years,” Caswell said. “It had a number of quirks.”
The new database is meant to manage all the original art. Its software, PastPerfect, allows the library to manage acquisition and donor information and to embed an image of a piece, she said.
The museum and library’s name comes from local cartoonist Billy Ireland, who was known for editorial cartoons and worked for The Columbus Dispatch for 37 years.
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