Articles

Archiving Newspaper Comic Strips: The San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection

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Abstract

This article describes a two-year project at The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library (CGA)' devoted to processing and describing newspaper comic strips from the collection of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art (SFACA), a nonprofit corporation founded by Bill Blackbeard in 1968. The SFACA collection is the largest known collection of cartoon art from American newspapers, so preserving its contents and making them accessible to researchers was essential to the study of this art form. Writing the finding aid to the collection required accommodation of Blackbeard's collecting philosophy, observance of the rules of archival description, creation of a descriptive scheme that would meet researchers' needs, and an approach that would fit within the framework of Encoded Archival Description (EAD). Although the challenges of processing the SFACA collection may seem unique to the comic strip format, archivists accustomed to working with more traditional documents will recognize shared concerns with original order, points of access, and other archival principles.

How to Cite:

McCrory, A., (2002) “Archiving Newspaper Comic Strips: The San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection”, Archival Issues 27(2), 137–150. doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/archivalissues.10915