Tag: International Museum of Cartoon Art (page 1 of 2)

Preparing Our Offsite Collections for the Move

If you are among the lucky who have set foot behind the scenes of the current location of the Cartoon Library, you know that our massive collection holdings cannot be contained to just this space. For many years, the Cartoon Library has occupied two offsite storage facilities for housing proofs, merchandise, and many of our bound volumes, as seen in the images below.

The expanded storage space in our new home in Sullivant Hall will afford us the ability to consolidate one of these entire additional housing areas into our archive home-base. Over the past few months, Assistant Curator Susan Liberator and Associate Curator Wendy Pflug have led our dedicated team of student workers in preparing these offsite materials to prepare for our move at the beginning of August.

The students have been sorting and rehousing items that will be relocating with us, and have come across a number of gems along the way. Of particular delight for the students was a large collection of various pop culture merchandise and memorabilia from the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, containing figurines, board games, oddities and artwork.

Below, some of our favorite finds:

StarTrekColorform

Colorforms Star Trek Adventure Set. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

We swear we fought the urge to play with the Star Trek Colorforms. Except for just a little–for the sake of making sure all pieces were accounted for, of course.

SmokeyTheBear

Warner Brothers plush toys and Smokey the Bear Appli-Press set. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

The students also came across some vastly varying Disney memorabilia of yore:

DisneyBox

Disney-inspired Mexican souvenir. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

DisneyWatch

Giant Disney wall watch. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Eddie Pisarczyk unpacking a wood wall decoration from Disney's Jungle Book. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Student assistant Eddie Pisarczyk unpacking a wood wall decoration from Disney’s Jungle Book. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Hannah Schobel with a Disney toy shovel. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Student assistant Hannah Schobel with a Disney toy shovel. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Mickey's Haunted House antique pin-ball game. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Mickey’s Haunted House antique pin-ball game. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

All of these items and more have been wrapped in archival packing materials and rehoused in storage boxes, to be ready to go on moving day.

We truly could not be making this move without the help of all of our student assistants, who have accomplished so much during this process and kept us laughing the whole way. Thank you for all of your help!

Congratulations to Meredith Spano!

We’re tickled to highlight student employee Meredith Spano on the blog today, who has recently hit the 100 mark in processing originals of continuing feature comic strip titles from our International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection (IMCA)! The IMCA collection was transferred to us in 2008 from Mort Walker, for whom one of our galleries in the new Sullivant Hall facility will be named. The collection contains thousands of priceless original cartoons from around the world, as well as books and artifacts related to all of the genres of cartoon art.

Student employee champion, Meredith Spano.

Since Meredith’s start date here in October, 2010 Meredith has been hard at work in building finding aids for continuing features in IMCA, and the 100 titles that she has now processed have included over 40,000 pieces that have passed through her hands for cataloging.

The process starts with physical sorting- Meredith, as seen in the image below, pours through the hundreds upon hundreds of daily and weekly strips, and arranges them physically in chronological order, neatly and safely in our acid free archival storage boxes.

Student employee Meredith Spano, sorting IMCA originals into chronological order.

After arranging the series, she gets to work on building a spreadsheet for the individual title that is later turned into a finding aid. You can see what the end result looks like here. Each individual strip has been assigned a finding number, and is listed by its publication date.

Below, a small slice of the rows upon rows of the IMCA collection boxes once they have been processed!

International Museum of Cartoon Art processed features by finding number

Meredith is double majoring in Arabic and International Studies, and is a proud and prominent member of the OSU Ukelele Club. Although her favorite series to work on so far has been Dick Tracy, the other 99 titles she has tackled include Bringing Up Father, Blondie, Henry, The Gumps, Katzenjammer Kids, Tillie the Toiler, Steve Canyon, Smitty, Rip Kirby, Polly and Her Pals, Moon Mullins, L’il Abner, Jungle Jim, and many many more.  The Cartoon Library simply would not run if it weren’t for our incredible student employees- thank you so much for all of your hard work, Meredith!

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