Kempleel Blog 2: Center for the Study of Political Graphics

The Center for the Study of Political Graphics is a non-profit organization dedicated to collecting , protecting and exhibiting posters "relating to historical and contemporary movements for social change." Their website has two types of digital collections - those meant to supplement their traveling, physical exhibitions, and those that are meant to stand alone merely as digital collections.

Collection Principles
CSPG claims over 50,000 posters from more than 100 countries, post WWII. Their stated goals (found under the "About CSPG" link) are to "conservation of these fragile graphic records... for future generations," as they represent "physically vulnerable markers of historical frontiers, international relations, and popular sentiment." They take donnations and their collection includeds some smaller specialized collections. They also collect buttons and bumper stickers. Only a small part of their collection is digitized, but they hope to add more "whenever possible." Interestingly, the digital exhibits include not just poster scans, but also some art that originated digitally and was not meant to be primarily physical, like the Women of Juarez Demand Justice.


Object Characteristics
Most of the digital objects are scans of later 20th century poster art, and they are arrainged in galleries by subject. Most galleries are small, only about 6 images, and are meant to be suplemental to the physical exhibitions. Currently there are six galleries meant to be permenant, completely digital, collections, that contain large numbers (more that 40-50) of images. Those galleries meant to suplement the physical contain very little information - a brief introduction to the subject matter and then the pictures, whereas the bigger galleries are further devied into smaller sections, and most of the graphics annotated with a interesting but still decidedly short note placing the work in it's context. All images open into an additional window of the web browser, and are displayed in jpeg format. Annoyingy, the images cannot be resized or zoomed in, resulting in many of the posters that contain small text to be rendered completely unreadable.

Metadata
The metadata for the images is minimal. Presumably, all the physical objects are held by OSPG at their officies in Los Angeles, although this is never stated. Images araccompanied by an artist's name, a place of printing, and a date, though often those categories are marked as unknown - understandable given the subversive, gorrilla art nature of the collection. Most are marked with a 3-5 digit number, though there is no indication of what that number represents. Some images have no accompanying information other that the title of the jpeg file.

Intended Audience

The intended audience is primarily other political artists, as those are the people listed by the site as primary users of the OSPG's resources (film directors, fine artists, cartoonists, musicians.) Additional users might be journalists, studetns of history and political activists, as well as the general public of course. OSPG;s mission statement is the preservation of these artifacts for general public education and consumption. The site is generally navigable, and the organization's contact information readily available.