Asian Comics Cataloging at Michigan State University
reprinted from Insight May 2014 - http://img.lib.msu.edu/giving/insight/Insight_May2014.pdf
"I always recommend the MSU Comic Art Collection to fellow comic researchers since it is the world's most comprehensive and internationally oriented collection in the field." Matthias Harbeck, doctoral candidate, Carl von Ossietzky Universität, Oldenburg, Germany
Help make our Asian comics accessible!
Comics are truly a global phenomenon, and an important goal of our Comic Art Collection is to document how cultures around the world have adopted and transformed the medium.
That's why our collection ranges from Golden Age adventure strips to South American fotonovelas, and from Japanese manga to a nearly complete run of THE 99 – the world's first comic series with Muslim superheroes.
However, it's not enough to acquire these diverse materials. It's essential to catalog them as well, so users near and far can determine what we have available.
Thanks to recent gifts, we have far more Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese comics waiting to be cataloged than we can handle – even with the broad range of language skills among the cataloging team!
Fortunately, help is available. We can send the work to an outside contractor, Backstage, which performs research-level cataloging in some 70 different languages. Backstage can complete about 150 of the most needed items for $5000 – and we have already have a generous gift of $1000 to start us off.
The Comic Art Collection is heavily used by MSU students and faculty working in the fields of history, literature, and cultural studies. Help us support their research by putting more Asian comics on the shelf!
