Jonny Grass Blog 4, Baldy Editorial Cartoons

The Clifford H. Baldowski Collection is a collection of the lifelong work of Georgia-based editorial cartoonist Clifford “Baldy” Baldowski.  The collection is housed at the Richard B. Russell Library, a special collections library for political research and studies within the University of Georgia Libraries.  Baldowski donated his work to the library, including 6740 pen and ink drawings and 2460 velox.  Thus far, the digital collection consists of approximately 2500 cartoons from the Baldy Editorial Cartoon Collection.  The digital collection has been created to provide good digital surrogates for research purposes, in order to better preserve physical objects and microfilm copies.

 

Collection Principles

The collection was donated entirely by Clifford Baldowski, the creator of its objects, beginning in 1994.  Baldowski donated approximately 3000 of his own cartoons to the library between 1994 and his death in 1999.  The collection was completed in 1999, upon Baldowski’s passing, as he willed roughly 4000 more cartoons to the Richard B. Russell Library.

 

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Metadata

The metadata about the collection is quite extensive.  A link called “About the Project” lists lots of collection metadata, both about the physical collection and the digital collection.  Since the digital collection has been produced largely to facilitate online research instead of research with the physical objects, the library has included good descriptive data on the website, including title, date, abstract, subject headings (LCSH and LCNAF), name and location of publication, format of original object, notes on copyright, and physical object location with unique identifying number.

 

Extensive technical metadata is included on the site, describing the techniques for preserving the physical objects and transferring them into digital surrogates in preparation for the online collection.  This metadata includes various types of equipment and preservation standards.  The site also provides detailed explanations of the reasons for its preservation and other choices, as well as its extensive procedures for reviewing and evaluating the web interface of the collection.  This review and evaluation process is a standard of the GALILEO (GeorgiA Library Learning Online) system, and involves user testing and keeping of use metadata (which is available at another site that is linked from this page).

 

Object Characteristics

Images are provided as thumbnails that can be clicked to link to a larger version of the image.  “To provide online access, DLG staff scanned the preservation microfilm using a Polaroid SprintScan 35 Plus film scanner to create 300 dpi grayscale images with a bit depth of 8. The non-bracketed exposure was scanned to provide the proper tonal range.” 

“The original scans are LZW compressed TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) format files.  The LZW compression is a lossless compression.  At the point of scanning, staff adjusted the white point to compensate for grayness from the film and darkening of the original due to the paper's acid content.  Occasionally after scanning, staff manually adjusted brightness and contrast.  These high-resolution TIFF images are retained by the Russell Library and the Digital Library of Georgia for archival purposes.”

 

Since the newspapers in which these cartoons originally appeared hold the copyrights to them, the library has scanned digital images with a watermark and copyright information.

 

Intended Audience

The collection is available for use by the general public, and intended primarily for research use.  It is based on a research collection housed at a research library, the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies.  The online collection is designed to be as useful to researchers as the physical collection in order to reduce use of —and damage  to —the physical collection.