The current work on the finding aid is largely conceptual. The Newspaper Clippings collection is to be divided into two series: Comic Sections and Comic Clippings. I have created a tagging structure that can encompass these two rather different series. Both are organized first by title, then by date. "Title" means something different in each series: in the first, it is the title of the newspaper in which the comic section appeared, with description at the item level. In the second, it is the title of the comic strip, with description at the box level.

Problems of additional description also present themselves. Ideally, the Sunday sections would receive detailed description at an additional component level. Early Sunday sections, from the late 1890's to the early 1920's, were not so standardized as they are now. Comic features came and went, their titles changed weekly, and important comic artists did one-time features. Additional <c> wrappers with cartoon titles, and <persname> attribution, would provide a much-needed index of the early work of American comic artists--if time allows for this much encoding.

The problem of tracking dates for comic strip clippings, without making the finding aid too large, has been solved through the use of Excel spreadsheets, which contain a month-and-date grid of holdings for each comic feature. These will be converted to PDF and will reside on the server with the finding aid, accessible through <extref> links.

A representative image of each comic feature, consisting of a single cartoon panel, will be available as a <dao>.