The British Cartoon Archive Digitisation (BCAD) Project - was part of phase two of the Digitisation Programme[2] funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)[3] to unlock a wealth of unique, hard-to-access material creating a critical mass of rich, permanent digital resources for the benefit of the widest user base possible within the UK further and higher education.
This project ran from 2007-2009 and digitised the Carl Giles Archive, the single most important archive of British newspaper cartoons, and a key resource for British political and social history that has never before been open to the public. The collection will become a major part of the existing University of Kent British Cartoon Archive, thereby creating the largest archive of cartoons in the UK. The entire collection of 15,000 cartoon images, with some 5,000 pages of related paperwork, has been made available.
Part of the project was the development of this new website which significantly increase its accessibility and usability and bring the metadata of the entire collection inline with current international standards.